The Window
by Summertime
Summary: Tony wakes up alone in a locked room. Gradually, he creates his own way out, but when rescue finally comes, how can he reconcile what he sees with what he knows? Now, finally, complete.
1. Tony I

Absolutely my first attempt at NCIS fic of any kind, but I've recently (and inevitably) become hooked on this show, and couldn't resist taking my hand at a story. As planned, this should be a three-to-four chapter/part story, getting up to maybe a hundred pages long. I hope you enjoy it.

-

The Window: **Tony (I)**

**-**

"_Special Agent Anthony Dinozzo was reported missing last night and his whereabouts are currently unknown. NCIS is now following all possible leads."_

He had touched the screen when they'd showed his picture. The static buzzed and whirred against him. He heard Kate taunting him in his head, _Narcissus_. He waited until they showed her and then he moved back, sat on the bed and waved. When they showed Gibbs, though, he closed all his fingers into a fist and bumped it in the air.

"All right, boss," he said happily, because Gibbs looked pissed beyond all belief. "Go get 'em. Well, go get _me_. Oh, come _on_," he said, as they showed McGee in the background, "you're letting Probie work my case?"

He was high-spirited for someone being held in a room he wouldn't have ever paid to stay in. He'd been there twelve hours already, but there was a TV, and he knew that Gibbs is coming along any minute. He could only imagine _that_ reaction, something like: "Damn, Dinozzo, I do an all-nighter for you and you're sitting on a bed watching the goddamn news?"

And then a slap to the head.

He almost looked forward to it.

"Come on," he said, urging them. "I can't be that hard to lose."

He'd checked the room out when he'd woken up with a splitting headache and heavy limbs, and he checked it out again, eyes making a sweep as he reclined. The lights were bright as floodlights, and they seemed to be on a continuous state of lit, never dimming or shutting off. The room was almost all concrete, except for the tiny, unreachable steel ventilators near each ceiling and the immense door. One bed, twin-sized, with scratchy sheets and not enough covering, but that was cool, because he wasn't planning on doing a lot of sleeping - if Gibbs would be angry to find him in a room with an electronic view, he would be furious to come in and catch him taking a nap. He'd never hear the end of _that _water cooler conversation:

"_Oh, did you hear how they found Dinozzo? Gibbs freaked, looked for him all night, and they finally break down the door and come in guns drawn - and the guy's asleep."_

So the bed wasn't a big deal, except it was the only place to sit. The TV was the only thing there to look at, but he'd wandered into the two connecting rooms, equally composed of concrete and steel, to check them out. Unbelievable, and he'd actually laughed, holding his stomach and almost bending double.

Some captor _this_ guy was. He'd fixed Tony up with a pantry and a bathroom. Okay, it was just an old sink that produced erratic spurts of rusty water, and a toilet so ancient it flushed by pulling a lamp cord, but he wasn't planning on taking a long soak, anyway. It was like the uncomfortable bed - one more dubious luxury he wouldn't have time to need.

The pantry was just as dismal.

"Whoever stocked this," he'd said to the emptiness, "had a really bland sense of food."

There were boxes of crackers, jars of peanut butter, bags of pretzels, packaged strips of jerky, and cases of bottled water. All of it plentiful, as if someone had been building this place as a bomb shelter. He was hungry, too, but he thought he'd leave that stuff alone. He wanted _steak_.

Plus, if he ushered Gibbs out quickly enough, he could probably manage a pretty convincing horror story: tell him that there'd been rats and a hideous voice coming out of the vents, telling him exactly what they were going to do with him, exactly where they'd hurt - and how cold it was. He'd tell Gibbs how cold it had been in the room, because that much was true.

It was _freezing_.

Tony yanked his jacket tighter around his shoulders and sighed.

-()

"_Special Agent Anthony Dinozzo has now been missing forty-eight hours."_

He checked his watch.

"It's been forty-nine," he said, injured.

He tried to smile at the screen when they show his team again, but he didn't feel that it was working. He went to the mirror and checked it - it looked more like a frown, or a grimace. He touched the corners of his mouth and pushed them up towards his cheekbones. It made a twisted clown slash of a grin. He held it there anyway and walked back into the bedroom with two fingers propping up the corners of his smile. On the screen, Gibbs was telling whoever took Tony that he _will_ find him.

Tony said weakly, "Right on."

The anonymous voice came back and told the viewing public that if they had any information on the missing Anthony Dinozzo, they should call the following number.

"Put Gibbs back on," he said. "Hey. Put Gibbs back on."

Like the TV was a phone, the voice was an operator, and he was really so desperate after two days in a room alone that he was talking to a soulless piece of technology.

-()

The television got two channels.

They both had static and neither of them had sports. He got the news, unfunny syndicated comedies with canned laughter he never echoed; and occasional reruns of black-and-white movies he'd seen a million times before. In the first week, he was at the door demanding a sports package, HBO, and a decent pay-per-view adult film channel. When he did it the first time, he collapsed back onto the bed, laughing, because he knows it's only a little while until Gibbs shows up, and he could afford to waste energy being a jackass, because when Gibbs got there, he'd have something else to watch entirely - namely, Gibbs going nuclear all over whoever was keeping him in this place. But the second time, after five days in the room, he yelled until he couldn't talk, he fell back onto the bed and just lay there, and he threw the remote at the wall so hard that the plastic cracked. He screamed silent frustration to the blank gray ceiling.

_You've got no right_, and his lips were just imitations of speech. _You've got no right, and Gibbs - Gibbs is going to - he'll - when he finds you_ _-_

He realized that he sounded like a child. When my father gets home . . .

He didn't care.

-()

On the news, he saw Gibbs looking into a sailor's involvement in a methamphetamine trade gone bad.

For the first time, they didn't mention _him_. They don't show his picture. He waited at the edge of the bed with his feet swinging back and forth and knocking against the frame, and then they showed the weather. There were two commercials for cat food and one for a spaghetti sauce. He waited patiently. If there was one thing confinement had done, it had taught him to be patient.

The news came back, and they covered a local fire.

Then a rerun of the _Twilight Zone_ came on. Tony sat there and stared at the black-and-white nostalgia sci-fi. He blinked and it was over, and a show was teaching him how to cook lobster. He salivated at the thought and felt disgusting, like Pavlov's dog.

But he was getting so sick of crackers and peanut butter, applied with his fingers. It made him feel like a four-year-old, and the temper tantrum he threw at the door, demanding grown-up food, probably hadn't helped dissuade (him? them? her?) whoever was keeping him that he wasn't.

Lobster. It was gorily red on the screen. Tony knelt and traced the shape with his fingers, and wow, how the mighty had fallen - gone from touching his photo to caressing the image of a crustacean instead.

He'd eaten lobster a few months ago, in a beautiful restaurant with a beautiful woman. He could remember the taste. He bit on his thumb and sucked on the moisture his mouth created, as if lingering somewhere in the print were the flavors of sweet seafood and melted butter.

"Still looking for me, boss?"

-()

For the first time in years, Tony prayed on his knees by the side of the bed. It wasn't much of a prayer. He said Gibbs's name into his hand a hundred times, his teeth nipping against the pads of his interlaced fingers, and he tasted salt. It was either tears or the remains of the pretzels he ate for dinner still sticking to the sweat on his skin, or both. His knees were cold against the concrete floor, bare in his boxers, and Tony felt his weight settling uncomfortably on his haunches as he leaned back. He looked down and watched the muscles in his thighs shift and conform to a more recognizable shape.

He'd lost weight.

The next morning, he took up jogging around the room. He told the door that he wanted to be in good shape when Gibbs came and found him, that way he could do a little ass-kicking himself. He jogged, he stretched, he did push-ups and sit-ups, and he drank some of the lukewarm bottled water when he was done. It was exercise. He'd rather be boxing in the ring with Gibbs, never mind winning or losing, but it was motion.

He sat at the end of the bed and watched TV some more.

He was resisting feeling grateful for the television set. He resisted the thought that it could be worse. It could be _better_. He could have TiVo, he could have a DVD player, he could have his whole apartment and his job and his life. He wasn't going to be grateful for a crap TV with static on both channels.

It was there so he could see the news, he knew that. He wasn't Kate, but he could reason out a few basic motives on his own. He knew that he had a TV so he could see what Gibbs was doing to save them, and so he could scream at the set when they were nowhere close. He caught himself falling in line with their plans one day, and then he bit his pillow and yelled into that.

Yelled: _You assholes, I'm _here_, not _there!

Except he couldn't blame them, because he wasn't sure where _here_ was. Here, as far as Tony Dinozzo was concerned, was a small room made of concrete.

-()

He examined the pantry the second week, and found luxury items. Plain, unscented bars of soap. Extra toilet paper. Three packaged electric razors, but no shaving cream. He shaved carefully with a foam of soap and got razor burn. No shampoo.

He bathed the best he could by splashing water and chasing it with soap, and to wash his hair, he bent over the sink and stuck his head under the faucet and rubbed whatever strands of hair he could catch between his fingers with the Dial. His fingers came up dyed copper from occasional coughs of rusty water. His hair dried crinkly and stiff.

In the second week, he started streaking lines on the mirror, tally marks. He didn't count them, but one day he looked up and there were twenty squiggly white lines of dried, caked-on soap. He stared at them. They stared back.

Tony looked at his striped reflection, bared his teeth, and unexpectedly began to cry.

-()

"_What are you doing here, Dinozzo?"_

"_Just hanging out, I guess, boss. Keeping busy."_

"_Keeping busy? The hell are you talking about? You wake up, you raid the pantry for crackers and peanut butter, you brush your teeth, you run around your little rat wheel, you take a bath standing up, you put on the same clothes you've been wearing for the last month, and you sit down and watch us chasing you. You're doing this on _my _time, Dinozzo."_

"_Sorry. Not much to do."_

"_Well, find something. You think I want to bust this door down to rescue your ass from being bored? Find a way to actively suffer so this whole thing isn't a complete waste of my time."_

He woke up sweating, his hands twisting into the sheets. He stared accusingly at the ceiling.

There were thirty-one soap-streaks on his bathroom mirror.

He wasn't mentioned on the news.

-()

There was a daytime soap opera that he watched every afternoon. He started to memorize the character names unconsciously, and before long, he was throwing his pillow at the TV, frustrated because Marcia slept with William who was really Andy's gay lover, and how stupid could Marcia be, to not figure that out? But on the episode next week, he found out that Marcia _really_ slept with William's brother, who turned out to really be William's sister, in drag. And Andy fell in love with William's transvestite sister and left William, who then really _did_ sleep with Marcia. For revenge.

This was the most fun Tony had had in a long, long time. In forty-seven days, as a matter of fact. He couldn't see his reflection in the mirror anymore. Sixteen days since he was last on the news, fourteen days since he'd seen Gibbs. Eight days since his last dream.

He worked it out on his fingers: he hadn't spoken in a week.

He thought about it, but there was nothing to say. He could tell Marcia that being a gay guy's straight rebound was probably not a good idea, he could tell the news anchors that his name was Tony Dinozzo and he was still missing, thanks for all the concern, or he could tell Gibbs to find him.

But even if he talked, no one would hear him.

He moved his mouth and the sounds stayed in the back of his throat. A dusty sounding creak came out from between his lips.

_Dinozzo_, Gibbs said in his head, _why don't you just shut up for a while?_

No problem, boss.

He lay down on the bed and he didn't stand for two days. Marcia left the show to go live with her mother in Florida and get over the humiliation of being the rebound. Tony dreamed about palm trees and woke up sobbing like a little boy.

-()

"_After two months, the search for Special Agent Dinozzo has been called off."_

In the end, that was all he deserved. A cursory announcement right before the weather review. He didn't see Gibbs. He howled at the television, demanded that it show him his boss.

He wanted to know that Gibbs was stalking around NCIS biting everyone's heads off. He wanted a shot of Gibbs saying that although the official investigation may be over, he wasn't going to rest until the people who stole Tony were dismembered. He wanted this to be Gibbs's Moby Dick.

But all he was given was a brief flash of a photograph and a cold voice, disconnected, spinning through space into his cold little room. When the screen was wiped clear and the news anchors, smug and immaculately-groomed, were ushered back into the pixels, Kelly gave Rob a peach-colored smile that spoke of perfectly orchestrated sympathy, and she said that it was sad, the way some people just disappeared into thin air. And Rob nodded gravely and agreed with her.

Tony punched his pillow, his mattress, his thigh. Muscles screamed in agony. He hit himself again and again, striking sideways.

"I didn't disappear!"

Over and over again, his fist swinging like a pendulum.

"I'm not in thin air! I'm here!"

He threw the remote at the wall again. It smacked against the cement and double-A batteries popped out and rolled across the floor, the sound escalating like guitar chords.

"I'm here!

"I'm here!

"What the hell are you playing at, Gibbs? I've been waiting, I've been a good little agent, I've been waiting for you the whole time, it's been _sixty_ _days_, Gibbs -"

Sixty days. Sixty lines of soap on a mirror. Sixty fucking lines and now he didn't even have a face anymore, because when he looked into the glass, everything was a smear of soap-scum that broke and peeled under his fingers like marble when he touched a tally line. Sixty days, sixty lines, and Gibbs wasn't there. Gibbs wasn't even looking anymore. Gibbs was sitting in the office shooting bull with Kate, listening to Ducky ramble, bring Abby Caff-Pow -

Gibbs wasn't looking for him.

Gibbs was glad that he was gone.

Gibbs was sidetracked, Gibbs was focused on something else, Gibbs was following somebody else's trail.

Gibbs was glad he was gone.

The day he'd gone missing, they had toasted each other at lunch, little glasses of champagne at Kate's apartment after work. Kate had given a speech about how good it would be to be able to wear a skirt to work and not have to listen to him tease her about it, McGee had flushed and been grateful that there would be no more Probie-ribbing, and Gibbs had smiled more than he had ever smiled with Tony. He had ruffled McGee's hair. He had told them how good it was going to be, how relaxing, to not have to deal with Dinozzo, who was infuriating, incompetent, a smart-mouthed idiot who had had the absolute temerity to assume that he _meant _something, to want affirmation, to even corner him and demand to be told that he was important. Was cared for. Was loved.

God, they had toasted each other and made a game of it! They'd gone on the news, ribbing each other - "Who can keep a straight face? Oh, McGee will break for sure, keep him in the back. Gibbs - when you said, 'we _will_ find him' - the way you looked, like you were really going to break someone's kneecaps just to find out where someone was stashing Dinozzo!"

"You laughed! You bastards, you laughed!"

Tony fell on his stomach on the bed and buried his face in the mattress, expecting to cry. He was surprised. He just breathed, air coming painful and burning its way down his throat, eyes teary but not . . . _not _crying. Just hiccupping into cold sheets, feeling his flushed face burn through.

Suddenly, he panicked.

He'd been cursing Gibbs, and he couldn't do that. Not when Gibbs was the only person who might, conceivably, be able to save him.

"I'm sorry," he said, but the words sounded trite, mixed in with a commercial for detergent. They were small, and his anger had been huge, all-consuming. "Gibbs, Kate, Ducky, Abby, McGee - I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. I'm sorry. I know you're looking. I know you won't give up."

He slid off the bed and walked unsteadily towards the television. Knelt. He started to pick up the remote from the ground, but instead pressed his hands against the screen, his palms covering the flickering images. If he could just reach far enough, he would feel them waiting for him. He could step through glass. Or at least, his voice would be borne by electricity and they would know that he was sorry, sincerely sorry.

He meant to apologize, but what came out was a plea.

"If you come and find me, I'll be so good." He sounds like a child again, trying to stay up past midnight. "Gibbs, I won't touch your coffee. I'll never be late. No personal phone calls at work. Kate, I won't touch your trash, I won't go through your things, I won't ever care if you have a date. I won't be mean to McGee. Ducky, I'll listen to you all the time."

More promises came out: he'd do whatever they wanted, he'd always do as he was told, he'd work overtime without pay, he'd pick up lunch for everyone, he'd be quiet and agreeable and considerate for the rest of his life, amen, if they would only come and let him out. He'd learned his lesson. He wanted to go home. Couldn't they just come and pick him up? Hadn't he been punished long enough?

The TV image turned to snow, the way it did every night.

Tony stared at the static surrounding his fingertips.

"Are you coming now?" he whispered, smiling hopefully.

The room was quiet. The white noise rolled over him and swallowed him whole.

-()

After that, the TV was gone.

What frightened him most was how calmly he accepted its disappearance. In some distant part of his mind, outside of the fog, he knew that it had been taken away from him because his captor knew that he had seen the announcement: the search was over. That was the only reason he had ever had the television, all sixty days of life leading up to the one moment when the voice told him that they had given up. It had been stolen while he had slept. Maybe there was something in the food - more likely in the water - that made him drowsy. Someone had opened the door to his prison and he had _slept _through the whole thing.

Stupid. So stupid.

He'd noticed his own lack of energy, lately, but he'd dismissed it as the product of eating the same food day in and day out, and that was probably part of it. He wasn't starving, but he was malnourished anyway. His skin was yellowy and looked like wax, as if it had been poured over the shape of his bones. He hadn't exercised in a few days beyond walking to the bathroom and the pantry. His hair was slick with oil and he could smell the sour odor of his sweat in his clothes and sheets, watched the perspiration shimmer on his bare skin.

His clothes had a continuous odor now, no matter how often he bathed. They simply weren't designed to be worn for months at a time. The fabric was worn thin from tossing and turning on the bed, his sleep more restless than usual.

He worked his way through, establishing a new schedule designed to eat up his day. He woke up. He ate as little breakfast as possible as slowly as possible, trying to simultaneously conserve food and consume time. He bathed and washed his hair. He knocked down towers of plastic bottles and reassembled them. He napped. He bathed again, scrubbed his hair until his scalp bled. His skin became an irritated shade of pink, but it was better than its sick, jaundiced look. He recited song lyrics. He thought about how good it was going to be to get out of here, how Gibbs was going to break the door down and Tony was going to grin at him from the bed and chuck a water bottle at him. He thought about places he had been, places he hadn't been, women he'd been with, and women he wanted to be with. He washed his clothes in the sink and wrung them out to dry. He put on a shirt that was stiff and curly, dried in spirals. His pants were too sodden to wear for days, so he sat around in boxers, which dried quicker, or half-naked.

He entertained himself by developing new storylines for his soap opera. In his head, Marcia came back and had a madcap affair with William's transvestite sister. Then one of the twins, Colin, discovered that he had a fatal brain tumor, and his brother, Cory, gave him some of his own brain tissue. He reveled in the scientific impossibility of the scenario.

He marked lines of soap on the mirror. Sixty-one. Sixty-two.

Seventy.

On day seventy-three, he noticed that he could count the bones in his hands. He wiggled his fingers as he made another tally mark on the glass, and watched the tendons play about under his skin. He stood there for almost an hour, alternating fingers, alternating hands. This was Must-See TV. This was intricate, this interlacing of tissue. This was _fascinating_. He traced his bare ribs with his newly thin fingers. He counted them. He smoothed down the skin over his collarbone. Pressed the heel of his hand against the slope of one hip. He'd known the number of bones in his body but never conceived of this, never thought of touching them. So exposed. An autopsy on Ducky's table. He drew a Y-cut with his thumbnail, pressed hard enough to slice the skin. An irritated red line blossomed. Press hard enough, and he could cut out his own heart, understand his organs the way he was now understanding his bones.

Intimate.

Funny.

-()

Look at the freak show. He jabbed one finger into his stomach, twisting. If he'd had a cigarette, he would have burned himself. Patterned himself. The scratches were stripes, the cigarette burns would be spots, and Tony would be a zoo animal. Then someone would come and rescue him, because he would be exotic and intriguing. People paid to see zoo animals, someone would certainly come and find him, if only to see him, to point and laugh.

Tony laughed and laughed, and then he rocked his head back on his neck and slammed it forward into the mirror. Glass shattered around his ears.

He was bleeding from his nose, his mouth, his forehead. There was a triangle of glass in the sink. It had all broken so easily. He kept laughing through a foam of blood, spitting out mouthfuls of the stuff, Silky, copper flavor. Pennies. Tony wiped blood out of his eyes and kept laughing. He brandished the triangle, the sharp edges burrowing into his fingers, cutting rings into the softest parts of his hands.

Pretty face. His pretty face. All bloody. He felt it with his spare hand. None of the cuts were very deep, but he was bleeding so much -

A concussion. He was going to have a concussion.

He practically danced to the door, pounded on it, threw himself against it. "You've got to come and get me now! I'll die now! I'll bleed to death! I'll pass out! I'm going to have a concussion! You have to come and get me now, you sick fucks!"

His laughter echoed in his ears, loud and hysterical.

"Gotta rescue me now, Gibbs, I'll die if you don't."

He fell asleep on the floor by the door, blissfully sure that he would wake up in a hospital, sure that he would wake up and someone would be sitting by his bed, sure that he would have an IV taped to his arm, being told that he had scared them to death. Gibbs would smile at him. Abby would hug him. Kate would look momentarily soft and wistful. And he would tell them all that he had been a little frightened, but he would glaze over how mind-numbing the terror had become, and he would be nice to them and not ever say that he had known they had stopped looking.

But he woke up, and he was still in the room. Dried blood was caked over his face. His lips were swollen. His head pounded fiercely. He had fallen asleep with the shard of glass, and there were deep, bloody grooves in the fleshy parts of his lower fingers from clutching at it in his sleep. When he pushed a fingernail against the cut, he could still feel the sensation, and that, at least was something. No nerve damage. Or minimal nerve damage.

"Gibbs? You didn't come and get me. I thought - I thought -" He wrinkled his nose and pushed his bloody hand up over his face, feeling the crust of blood. "I shouldn't have even woken up. Hey, Gibbs, how many days now? How many days has it been? I broke the mirror."

A lightning bolt rocked into him.

"Seven years bad luck. That's - that's seven years, I'd die - I'd die in here - I can't take it." He scrubbed his arm over his face. He laughed nervously. "Seven years. Two thousand, five hundred fifty days. Okay. Sixty-one thousand, three hundred twenty hours. Minutes. I don't know. Seven years is an awful lot of minutes, Gibbs. I don't know if I can do that. Just - days. I can do days. I remember days."

-()

Look out the window.

Remember.

The window was the border between the room and the rest of the world, and he carved it in the place where the television used to be. He couldn't scratch the concrete with the glass, and he was afraid that too much effort would make it shatter in his hand, but after a minute of working, he went back to the bed and found that he had created the window, after all. That there was a perfect square, a gap in the wall, and when he looked in it, it stole his gaze.

Look. Remember.

Remember the way the days started too late in the morning, when the sun was already liquid gold and the asphalt boiled underneath his feet. Remember the time he woke up at five in the morning and called Kate, when he teased her until he came with her to watch the sunrise in front of the Washington Monument like they were tourists, sitting in the sundial shadow of the tower, with Kate digging her fingers into his ribs and moaning that if he ever woke her up that early ever again, he would be so dead, but yes, it _was _pretty. Remember _everything_. Remember the blare of the alarm clock, stumbling into the shower. Remember the smell of Gibbs's coffee, strong and black, how he wasn't supposed to touch but had stolen some anyway, his first week on the job, had taken a long drink of the coffee when Gibbs wasn't looking - that was the first time Gibbs had smacked him. The coffee had been bitter, but worth it, because of how Gibbs had looked at him like he was _really_ looking at him. The first time Gibbs had said his name, growled, "Dinozzo - hands off the coffee."

Days. He could do that. He must have thousands of them in his memory, stockpiled away, and when he woke up, he would go over them, relive a morning. Good or bad didn't matter, as long as it wasn't a morning confined within these four walls.

He didn't eat that day. He leaned against the wall and remembered the way the band of Kate's watch had shimmered when they had watched the sunrise, how he had thrown grass on her shirt. Remembered the taste of Gibbs's coffee, two years gone on his tongue.

-()

One hundred days.

He etched the number into his skin at the top of his shoulder, a straight line and two uneven eggs rolling down his upper arm. One hundred.

He was running out of memories.

It wasn't that he didn't have them anymore, it was just that he would reach for them and then they would slip away, the way sand receded in wave, his memories being stolen away inch by inch. He would fold his hands behind his head, close his eyes, and think about his first day on the job in Baltimore, but he would lose pieces of the day, so he would turn to the first time Gibbs had given him a compliment, but the details would grow fuzzy, the images black and white. His first girlfriend, but without the texture of her skin. It was like trying to assemble a Frankenstein's monster of a history, with none of the pieces fitting together exactly and all of them a little decayed.

It had been two days since he'd eaten anything, hours since he'd had any water. His voice was a croak.

"Hey," he said.

Gibbs was leaning against the wall.

"You come looking for me, boss?"

"It's nothing personal, Dinozzo. Would have done it for anyone."

Gibbs was looking at some imaginary speck of lint on his coat-sleeve, and he flicked it away. Tony felt ashamed, being naked, but his clothes were still sopping wet. He burrowed under the sheets and tried to turn, to hide his arm and the etched numbers from Gibbs, but Gibbs saw everything, just like he always had.

Gibbs looked disgusted. "This is a waste of my time."

"I'll get better," Tony said desperately, pushing himself up, and forgetting to hide the blood or his nakedness. The sheets fell down around his hips. "I promise. Just let me out."

"A hundred days and you're using yourself as a calendar." Gibbs was shaking his head from side to side, the cool expression in his eyes nothing but contempt. "_McGee _could have lasted longer. I thought you were supposed to be so tough, Dinozzo. It's just over three months, and you've got seven years to put behind you. If only you hadn't broken that mirror."

"I'm sorry."

"You're always sorry. You never change and you never learn, but yeah, you're always sorry."

He winced. "When did you start sounding like my father, boss?"

"Three months and you still haven't found a way out of here. It's just pathetic, Dinozzo. I'm embarrassed. We spent hours and manpower looking for you, we expected a little resourcefulness on your part."

"I tried," he said, and he had, but the vent had been too high, even when he had been standing on the TV, and the room had been so solid, so impenetrable - he blinked. "How did you get in?"

Gibbs gave him the look that made his skin crawl, the look reserved for people who had dropped irrevocably low in his eyes. "I _walked_, Dinozzo. The door's open, for God's sake. You couldn't even walk out of here, could you? What is this, an extended vacation? You looking for another job? I don't have time for agents who can't figure out how to get out their kennels all by themselves."

"Kennels?"

"For _puppies_." Gibbs pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead. "You really are hopeless."

"The door's closed, boss."

He tried a weak impression of charm, tried to smile, but couldn't. But he was sure about this one, no way could he be wrong. The door was closed. The door was just another piece of the wall to him. It didn't even have a window - it was all steel. It was a way in, not a way out. His side didn't even have a handle, how could he reasonably be expected to walk out?

"That's the problem with you," Gibbs said, sipping from a cup of coffee that hadn't been there a moment ago. "When worst comes to worst, you'd rather sit here and wait for me to come and rescue you than take any initiative. That's why you're here in the first place. Don't you remember what happened before you woke up in here?"

"No."

"Bullshit, Dinozzo. You haven't even tried."

"Yes, I have! I've been over it in my head a hundred times!"

"What? Once a day?"

He buried his head in his hands. "I can't do this, boss. I can't get out of here. I've tried, you know, I'm not _that _bad. But you're crazy. The door's not open, the door doesn't even have a fucking _handle_, there's no handle, there's no way to reach the vent -" He realized that a whine was building in his throat, high and erratic, and he clamped his mouth shut, bit down on the fleshy part of his hand. "I don't know what to do. I don't know why I'm here. I don't know what happened. You want to know what I _know_, Gibbs? I know that you were looking for me and then I know you stopped. Because I really am replaceable."

Gibbs sighed. "You know I don't like self-pity."

"I don't care."

"Or petulance. You're not a child, Tony, stop acting like one."

"Help me," he said finally, lowering his voice. He couldn't even gain enough strength to lift his head and look at Gibbs; couldn't stand to see that contempt. "If you can walk through walls and get in here, you can help me out, can't you? I'll get better."

"Tony."

Something in the tone told him that it was safe to look up. It was an expression he had hardly ever seen on Gibbs's face - sympathy.

"If I could," Gibbs said, "I would."

He tried to understand, and couldn't. _So stupid_. He brought up one hand and pressed it out towards Gibbs and watched his hand sink through the plain black shirt. He felt the sudden heat of tears on his face, and turned aside, unwilling or unable to let even an imaginary Gibbs see him crying. Angrily, he wiped at his eyes, and turned back. Gibbs was smiling at him, eyes warm. He held out the cup of coffee with that logo that Tony, who had now forgotten so many things, couldn't help remembering perfectly.

"You ought to drink something," Gibbs said. "Stay alive, Dinozzo. I'm coming."

He accepted the cup and then almost dropped it. It didn't feel like the usual stiff paper, it was larger, slicker, heavier - oh. He tilted it and water brushed over his lips and tongue. He drank until his throat ached with the effort and then he tucked the empty bottle to his chest and crushed it, listening to the plastic give underneath his grip.

"Mine," he said, looking down at it.

"I'm coming," Gibbs said. "I promise. Nobody gets left behind."

"Not even me?"

Gibbs sipped his coffee. "_Especially_ not you, Dinozzo."

"I wish you were real."

Gibbs didn't say anything, but he sat down beside him. Tony reached for a package of crackers and slowly began to eat. The crumbs stuck to his tongue and the salt irritated the cuts in his mouth, but he couldn't taste a thing. It hurt to swallow. He tried to pretend he was eating something else, but the thoughts of food were too distant, too unrelated. Had there really ever been anything that wasn't this?

"Stay with me," Gibbs said.

Tony closed his eyes and took another bite. "I'm trying."

-()

On day one hundred twelve - the number plus twelve tally marks carved into his skin - it was Kate who woke him up, leaning over his bed. It was the smell of her perfume that he dreamed of, teasing its way into fitful dreams and sliding him upwards to consciousness. Her hair was hanging an inch above his face, but when he tried to sit up, he couldn't feel it slide over his skin, and that ruined the fantasy. Oh well. He wasn't sure how up he was to fantasies anyway. Just sitting up made his head spin. It _definitely_ felt like all the action he could take for today.

"Malnutrition," Kate said imperiously, sitting down at the foot of his bed. "You need to eat something. Actually, you need to eat something different for a change, but that's not an option. So get yourself into the pantry and grab some food before you die in here."

"Fuck you," he whispered.

"You can't live on water, Tony."

"You're not even real." He threw an empty bottle at her and it passed clean through, proving his point. Hollow satisfaction devoured him. "Some NCIS agent, can't even manage to - to - to be _corporeal_." He grinned savagely. The word was there.

"Some NCIS agent," she mocked him. "Can't even manage to get out of bed."

"There's no point, Kate. No one's coming."

"Self-respect. The Tony Dinozzo I knew wouldn't give up."

He turned his face into the pillow. When he finally looked at her again, it was just to ask if she could hand him the glass, because he needed to mark off another day. Kate just crossed her arms over her chest and said that she wouldn't, even if she could. He told her that, as far as hallucinations went, she sucked, wasn't helpful in the slightest - even Gibbs had tricked him into thinking that he had some coffee. Even Gibbs had managed to trick him out of bed without him noticing.

"You were less crazy when Gibbs was here."

"Fine," he said, "then the least you could do is sleep with me."

Kate sighed. "Eat something and I'll think about it."

If someone had asked him at first, he would have said that there was enough food in the pantry to last a person for years. Still, he'd conserved food the best he could, and lately, eating had become more of a chore than a pleasure - a gritty necessity. But even with the conservation, even with his near starvation, the supply was more than dented. It had dwindled more than he'd realized. The water supply was even worse - he was down to the last two cases.

_I could drink the sink water, if it got bad_.

He wasn't sure that he'd survive swallowing any of that water, with the rust, but it was a bridge he'd have to cross. Eventually.

He slid down, back against the wall, and ate the first thing he found. He was halfway finished when he realized that he was forcing handfuls of pretzels into his mouth. Everything tasted the same, and all of it was harsh on his tongue. Everything was too dry, too rough. No wonder all he wanted these days was water. He wanted a river of it going through the room . . . He'd passed out of the land of needing lobster and friendship, and had gotten to the point where the thought of fresh, icy water was enough to make his eyes glaze over with longing.

"All right," he called, not looking up. "I ate."

There was no answer.

He turned his head. Kate was gone. Even the sheets were unwrinkled where she had been sitting a moment ago.

"Tease," he said flatly, and slumped over.

He cut the next tally into his arm, and some voice, some hallucination that he didn't recognize this time, urged him to go deep. _Go for the gusto, Tony_, it said, a hoarse whisper. _Go deep, or who knows? It might heal and you might not have a mark. All the days will go away, and you won't have anything then._

He cut deep.

"I had a friend who did that," McGee said. He was looking at the blood on Tony's arm with frank fascination, too innocent for Tony to snap at him. "In high school. He, um, did that a lot. He said that it made everything go away."

"Yeah? What happened to him?"

McGee looked embarrassed, that little flush rising in his face. "He killed himself. I think - I think it was an accident. He was Catholic, I don't think he wanted to bleed out on purpose. But he cut deeper than he meant to, and he died." The flush deepened, turned almost scarlet. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have brought it up. That's - that's stupid of me."

"S'okay, Probie. Not your fault. Not even you."

"Don't go too deep," McGee said. "We're coming."

"Yeah, yeah, heard it all before and a thousand different ways. Gibbs and Kate said the same thing. But it doesn't matter, does it? You're all just voices in my head - no offense, Probie. I like the company. But promising myself that someone's coming to save me is just wishful thinking. Gibbs said that any NCIS agent ought to be able to find his way out of a room like this and not wait for someone to come, and he was right. Always is."

"But it wasn't Gibbs."

Tony crunched a pretzel between his teeth. "What?"

"It wasn't Gibbs," McGee said, his speech speeding up. "If we're not real, if Gibbs wasn't real when he was promising that he'd come and get you, then why would he be real when he was telling you that you were worthless? Just because a hallucination is, um, negative instead of positive, because the views you're pulling out to show to yourself are pessimistic and not optimistic, doesn't mean they're more valid. Why do you think Gibbs saying that you're hopeless is more valid than Gibbs saying that he's still looking?"

Even an imaginary McGee was smarter than him.

"Sure, whatever, Probie."

-()

He had put nothing in his stomach and somehow it was coming up anyway, rebelling against the faintest hint of substance that he tried to put past his lips.

The nausea would lie in wait until he tried to eat and then it would attack again, dry-heaving and gagging before he could even get anything in his mouth. The water would stay down for maybe an hour before he was on his knees in front of the toilet, puking and clenching the sides until his knuckles whitened and his arms trembled. The strength it cost to hold him upright was almost more than his body was willing to give him, but some raw dignity left at his center couldn't bear the thought of collapsing and taking a face-first dive into his own vomit and the sour-smelling toilet water. He peeled away and leaned against the wall, panting, feeling waves of sweat break over his brow. His hair was soaked with it, it had gotten so long that cleaning it was a disaster, and now the sweat mixed with oil and made it feel almost unbearably heavy.

Sometimes it was Gibbs who was coaxing him to drink another bottle of water, to try again; sometimes it was Kate; sometimes Abby or McGee; sometimes it was even his mother. Sometimes his father was in the back of the room, sipping some tonic mix and looking at him with thinly-veiled disapproval. It was never Ducky. Tony thought that his mind, now going blank on his _own_ memories, didn't have one-tenth of the capacity to summon Ducky's erudition.

It didn't matter who it was, because he knew that it wasn't them, and as he got weaker, he couldn't stand to listen to his own mind coddling him. He fought against them, concentrated on how empty the room was, how alone he was, and then he was throwing up again, hating his reality as much as his own body apparently hated _him_. He yelled at his passing, unreal companions until they vanished with one last reproving word and one last sentiment, an empty promise to rescue him that they couldn't fulfill.

Gibbs lasted the longest, but even he left eventually.

The way Tony figured it was that no one, not even your hallucinations, would want to put up with you when you were sick and a smart-ass to boot.

When they were gone, he wished that he could take it back. He called into the emptiness for one of them to come back and talk to him, to explain what he was thinking. He asked Gibbs to stay; asked Kate to tell him what was happening, why he was so sick; asked, pitifully, for his mother to sit with him. He took back the things he'd said to McGee, promised not to be mean, if McGee would help him.

But no one came.

_You idiot. Everyone leaves. Everyone gets out of here but you. This is the end of the line, and face it, Dinozzo, you earned your stay. This is what you get for not being what they wanted. And then they tried to help and you turned them away? Not good enough, not real enough? They couldn't touch you, couldn't be everything you needed, so they were worthless? No wonder they locked you up in here. Anybody would._

He pressed his head down to the cool porcelain.

Kate had warned him about this. She'd said . . . something about karma. How, with women alone, he had built up enough bad karma to go around a couple of times. Enough to be reincarnated as a gnat. Enough to be locked in a refrigerator with a bathroom for however long the karma wheel wanted him to be.

"What goes around comes around," he said. He pushed off the toilet and fell against the wall. The cement felt cool and slick. "And around and around and around. Right, Gibbs?" Silence. "Listen, I'm sorry. I was out of line. _Way _sorry, boss. Come on. Where's a hallucination got to be anyway?"

There was no one, no one, no one. No one but him. And that was his fault, too.

The silence wrapped around him, pulled him under.

And the room, as if alive, gave him two options, heard so clearly in the quiet and sheer loneliness. Almost spoken in the faint whisper of the ventilator and the running of the water.

He could keep doing what he was doing, trying to push food into a body that didn't want it anymore; trying to give life to something was that was now so dead as to be ready for burial; trying to drive away the insanities that were filling the empty corners of his mind in a vain attempt to replace what had been stolen from him. He could choose to eat sparingly until there was nothing left to eat, he could choose to grind the now permanently bloodstained glass beneath his heel and give up counting, he could die in this room in the absolute agony of conscious starvation but perfect, undeterred sanity. That was option number one.

Option number two was to let go.

Not to cut deep, the way McGee had warned him about, but to just give up. To go back to the bedroom and close his eyes, to lose himself in whatever memories he had left. And when the hunger and thirst got to be too much - he wouldn't use it as motivation to rise and go looking. He could use it as a dual force to drive him down deeper, deeper - until he drowned. Option number two was insanity, the painless drifting that would separate him, would sever him, would give him back his friends.

_Choose_.

"Tony, don't." McGee looked to be about an inch away from his face, leaning in so close that his eyes magnified and looked swimmy and exaggerated, almost cartoonish in his pale face. "Don't. Those aren't the only choices. Gibbs always said that you were on his team because you could think outside of the box. _Think_. You're in the box. Think your way out."

"I already told him," Tony said tiredly. "I tried getting out, there's no way."

"Not like that. Think outside your two choices. This place is getting to you."

"Probie, I broke a mirror with my _face_. I tried to convince a hallucination of Kate to sleep with me. I've got numbers carved into my skin. This place isn't getting to me, it's already _gotten _me. And I can't even imagine anyone to talk to be people I work with and my parents. I don't have a single old girlfriend strolling in to make me a really good offer, so yeah, I think I'm down to two choices, and if I'm talking to you, I think I'm closer to the second one."

McGee sat down, hard. "You don't have to do this."

He closed his eyes. "Oh, I really think I do, Probie."

"There's a third choice."

"Tell me, then. Don't hold back with all that knowledge, share with the class." He slid the glass triangle along the curve of his wrist, just lightly enough to scratch. The Not-McGee watched his motions warily, and Tony found that he liked watching his hallucinations be afraid for him. "Come on. Speak up. Teacher can't hear you, McGee."

"Well, I, I don't exactly know what it is, but general policies suggest that there - "

"That there's always a third choice, right?"

McGee nodded. "At least, there's a place where choice one meets choice two."

"Choice three," Tony said, "I kill myself right now, in this dingy little bathroom, and if Gibbs is still looking for me, he finds a corpse. And I'd think about feeling bad, except I'd be dead. So selfishly, I'd go about my way. No Patrick Swayze sticking around for _this _guy."

"There are four choices."

"You going to keep adding numbers till you find a solution that you like? Believe me, McGee, I've been over this. It doesn't get any better. He took the window and now all the voices are gone. So I have to make them up. That's why I have you."

"Ah," McGee said, nodding. "Like the Greek Chorus."

"It's amazing, the crap I can pull out of my own head to make you sound like you."

"There's a fourth option."

"Maybe I can't dredge up that much stuff. You're pretty much a broken record, aren't you?"

McGee was filling out some paperwork on his bent knees, his pen moving in unerring scratches across the paper. Tony sneaked a glance, but he couldn't read the words - it was as if the exact letters escaped him, leaving him with just pictures of sentences, the way McGee was just a picture of someone that he had known . . . once . . . a very, very long time ago. So long. Probie. Probationary agent. _Forget it, McGee, he's still alive_. And wasn't _that _when he had started resenting McGee, just a little?

Good a time as any to make his apologies.

"I'm sorry about that," he said. He didn't have to explain the "that" because McGee was him and he was McGee and option number two was looking better all the time, because then the apology could be real and the forgiveness more valid.

McGee waved his hand. "It's okay."

"I was a jackass to you."

"Not always," McGee said, and it sounded more convincing than a straight out "no, you weren't", so either not-McGee was a better liar than real-McGee, or Tony actually had been okay on a couple of occasions. "It was about Gibbs. It's usually about Gibbs."

"If I take option number two, you'll stick around, won't you? If I pull a reverse Russell Crowe, _Beautiful Mind_, if I decide that I'd really rather just be crazy instead of trying for that whole sanity thing, you'll be here, won't you? You. Gibbs. Kate. Abby. I can probably even get Ducky in here if I really try. Maybe I remember enough to make him be Ducky."

"You don't get to choose your hallucinations, Tony," McGee said. "You could end up with anything."

"Maybe anything is better than nothing."

McGee filled out another line of incomprehensible paperwork. "Yes," he said finally. "If you go with option number two, I'd stick around. All of us would. We're figments of your imagination, Tony, do you really think we have a better place to be?"

"That's good." He couldn't think. He couldn't even move. All he did was slide down the wall and lie on the floor, his cheek against the cool tile, and once this would have disgusted him, lying on the floor of a bathroom this filthy, this redolent with sweat, puke, and blood, but now he had moved beyond, to a place where dignity was so far off the charts that it wasn't even part of the sanity package-deal. "That's good, McGee. Real good."

McGee peered at him. "Are you going to choose something?"

His eyes fluttered shut again. "Maybe," he said. "Maybe later. You said - four options. So give me some time to figure out the last one, and then I'll pick."

"All right."

That was Gibbs. He almost straightened, but Gibbs told him not to, said that he was tired and even the best had to sleep sometimes. He wished that Gibbs would put a hand on his shoulder or something, so that it would be real, but it wasn't, and Gibbs didn't.

"It's a good choice, Dinozzo."

"Which one?"

He realized he was whispering. Had maybe been whispering the whole time.

"Sleeping," Gibbs said. He was smiling. He smelled like sawdust. It made Tony so sickeningly homesick that he wanted to curl up and let go, pick option two right now, but he forced his eyes to stay open and trained on his boss. The phantom of his boss. "That's what I'd do."

"Really?"

Gibbs nodded. "Really, Dinozzo."

"Will you - be here - when I wake up?"

Somehow, he got the words out from between the yawns, but even he could barely understand them. His throat was sore, his voice cracking on every syllable, the words themselves turning to mush as they slid out of his lips. They felt so heavy that he was surprised he didn't hear them splattering against the floor like oversized blood drops.

"I'll wait," Gibbs said.

Tony dreamed of a rescue, of the cavalry coming in and pulling him out of the place. Gibbs broke down the door and Tony was waiting on the bed, looking out his window, and he said simply, "Hey, boss. Been a long time." And Kate was there, sweeping in, gun drawn, and when she saw him, her face lit up and Tony showed them his window. His window, and how he had been watching them the whole time, looking for them while they were looking for him. "I knew you never stopped." And the dream wrapped itself into a loop and spun around him, tightening and encircling, a fantasy that he kept preserved.

-()

One. Five. Six.

These numbers, on his right arm. It was harder to cut, he had to hold the glass in his left hand and stretch across his chest, and he'd never been ambidextrous.

"I wish you'd stop that," Gibbs said.

"Gotta know. How many days. It's important. Can't forget that, the way I've forgotten - everything."

The way he was now forgetting words. They slipped away from him. Words that he used to utilize to annoy Gibbs, to tease Kate, and to charm - he was now fumbling over them, unable to shape phonetic noises into anything meaningful. Twenty tallied days ago, when McGee had told him to find the fourth option, he had still been able to force the sounds coming out of his mouth to be something more than verbal slush. Now, he was losing even that. His visitors were in better shape, but even they were growing more taciturn. The other day - the other week - the other month - Kate was there, but she never said anything at all, just smiled at him from the corner while she worked numbers into her PDA.

"When you come," Tony said, "I'll have the numbers."

Kate was leaning against Gibbs's shoulder. "They don't mean anything, Tony. They're abstract concepts."

He shook his head. "No. Math - sometimes. Not numbers. Numbers are real." He tried to explain to her about how he had loved math in high school _because _of how abstract it could be, because of how the equations could be changed and shaped to give up their answers and secrets, but how he had also loved the concrete value of the numbers. How what you learned when you were in preschool by counting dried beans and reading off charts was still true - how it went: one, two, three, four . . . and on. All he could manage was the blunt declaration, "Real."

"They aren't real in here, Dinozzo," Gibbs said. "You know there's no time in a box."

"And if there's no time, you're just scratching yourself," Kate added. "That doesn't sound very sane to me, Tony. Not sane at all."

"I'm making it," he said. "Time. If there isn't any. I'll do it."

"You can't make time."

Was it really pity in Gibbs's voice? Was he really that far gone that Leroy Jethro Gibbs, who never pitied anyone, had stooped to pitying _him_? He flung his pillow at the shadow and watched in dispassionate, meek surrender as the small square of cloth thudded through, not touching a thing. Gibbs shook his head, and picked up the pillow, examining the stitching, before dismissing it and dropping it on the floor. No contempt now. Tony, looking down at his own body, filthy with blood and so thin, guessed that he had moved beyond contempt and into that incomprehensible pity that he didn't want. That he hadn't asked for.

"Yeah," Tony said. "Impossible, isn't it?"

"Did you find it?" Kate leaned forward eagerly. "The fourth option?"

He shook his head. "I think - McGee - I think he made it up. Invented. Make me feel better. Keep me from . . . number three. Killing myself. But there's no fourth. I checked. Looked out the window, and you said . . . no fourth. But you were coming, so that's . . . that's okay."

"We're coming," Gibbs said.

That was what Gibbs said more than anything else these days. Gibbs promised to come and save him, Kate asked if he had found the fourth option, McGee kept trying to get him to put the glass down and talk, and Abby complained about how boring the room was. Sometimes she sat with him on the bed and they looked out the window together, because that was a little more interesting than doing nothing at all. Sometimes she told him that he smelled and needed a shower, and Tony would groan but eventually find some soap - but then he'd just end up staring at the way it looked in his hand, the shape of it, and forget what he'd been trying to do. He'd pull the soap over dry skin and white flakes would peel off onto his scars. Sometimes one of them would make him eat something, or drink something, but mostly, they were just company, and redundant company at that.

"The fourth option," Kate prompted. "McGee said that it meets in the middle, between the first and second. Between sane and insane. Think about it."

"I can't." He pounded his fists against the bed, but they didn't make as much noise as they were supposed to. It was just muffled. Everything he did in here was muffled, all of it just an echo of what would have happened outside. "Can't think. Can't see it."

"For God's sake, Kate, give the boy some kind of a hint," Gibbs said. He was sitting now, the pillow across his knees. "He's trying."

Kate pushed hair out of her eyes. "It's like a kid with an imaginary friend," she said reluctantly. "He knows it's not real, but he doesn't stop pretending. He waits to grow out of it, because he will, and in the meantime, he enjoys what he sees. But he doesn't _believe_ it."

"What I'm doing now," Tony said, and coughed. He meant to continue immediately, but the single cough lengthened and turned into a full-blown jag. When he could finally breathe again, he said, "What I'm doing now. Talking to you. But you're not here."

"You know we're not here," Gibbs said. "But you think that window is."

"I have a window," he said stubbornly. They'd had this argument before. "They put it there when they took away the TV. I have a window."

"All right," Gibbs said quietly. "You have a window. If you want."

"I _need_ it," he said, not caring how he sounded. It was true, anyway. If he didn't have the window, he was just someone who had lost his mind, talking to himself in a room that was so cold and so sterile that it was like a tomb, a laboratory, a bell jar. He needed his window because, without the window, there was nothing but this room, never had been anything but this room, and even his hallucinations were less real - because what they were mimicking had never existed.

Kate prodded. "The fourth option. Between sane and insane. You can do this."

"I don't want to."

"Bad attitude, Dinozzo."

"Think about the window." She pointed to it, waved her hand in a cutting sideways arc. "You can have your window and you can have us, but you have to keep going. You have to believe that we're coming."

"You're already here," Tony said.

He gave them his best smile.

-()

There was no more water.

He stood in the pantry with his head cocked to one side, listening as Gibbs told him what to do. It was simple stuff, Gibbs told him, Marine stuff, things he should have been taught. Stuff that he probably should have picked up on after three years with Gibbs, regardless of how much he supposedly hadn't been paying attention. He could almost feel the slap on the back of his head as Gibbs tried to get him into gear, told him to grab one of the empty bottles and go to the sink.

Marine Rule Googolplex: Always have some plastic bottles laying around.

"Good thing," Tony said, "I never - went in - for recycling. Right?"

He was starting to sound like someone with a bad case of asthma, panting for breath simply from the exertion of walking around the room, but he had to keep going. Had to get water. And Gibbs had shown him how. Marine trick - top secret stuff. He shouldn't have even told him, Gibbs could get in serious trouble - a breach of clearance. Confidentiality. He couldn't remember which. Either way, Gibbs had made him promise not to tell anyone.

He had to cling to the walls in order to make it to the bathroom.

"All right," he said. "Now. The water. The trick."

Gibbs was right behind him, Tony could almost _feel_ that, and he wished that he hadn't broken the mirror. He wished that he could see Gibbs mirrored in behind him, maybe with a hand hovering over his shoulder, wanting to touch but not able. Gibbs wasn't real, but that wasn't his fault. He could have turned around, but it seemed like too much energy - impossible amounts. Might as well ask him to jet off for the moon.

"Put the bottle under the faucet," Gibbs said.

He stuck it beneath the tap, the top of the bottle nudging the rusty metal.

"Maybe open it first, Dinozzo."

"Oh." He felt his face heat up. "Right. Yeah." He unscrewed it and moved it back down into the sink. "Water's . . . water's gonna be rusty, boss. Maybe not safe to drink."

"Good thinking, Dinozzo. Move it back, let the water run for a while. Maybe it'll clear."

He smiled. Good thinking. He was thinking.

He tilted the bottle back so that the mouth faced his wrist instead of the faucet, and then turned the water. One of the knobs was stuck, and he had to pull at it, an involuntary whimper coming out from between his clenched teeth. _So _stuck. Super-glued. Iron-forged. Except it wasn't, and he knew it, he could just see the thin layer of rust holding it to, but he could feel the sweat pouring down his face, trying to get it to budge. Finally, with a terrific squeak, it lashed into full-power, and rusty water sprayed over his hands.

"Shit! Shit!"

Even his curses sounded weak; pathetic.

"Good, Dinozzo. Good job."

"Seems like a lot of effort - just for water."

"You need it. You can do this. Look, the water's clearing up already."

And it was, although it was still a little orange-tinted. But Tony had been washing with this water for one hundred sixty-eight days now, and when he had still been able to keep his hair clean, he had let it run before - it never cleared up anymore than this. Always that fluorescent orange, like a neon light falling out of the faucet. At least it was a color - he had precious few of those. He moved the bottle back under the flow and watched it fill up with filthy orange, the color of rotten tangerines. _Tangerines_. Another word without a context - what was it, anyway? He just saw a roundness, a heaviness, a color - probably a made-up word. Probably not real, like Gibbs. Like Kate. Like him.

Thinner and thinner and more and more alone, until there was nothing left, and he was his very own ghost.

The water was running all over his hand.

"It's going to be cold this time," Gibbs said. He sounded as if he was trying to comfort. "I don't know what it's going to taste like, but it'll be cold."

"Like that," Tony said sleepily. "Different."

He raised the bottle to his lips and drank.

It was the worst thing he had ever tasted, he knew _that _beyond a doubt. It was enough to make him gag, and rusty water slopped all over his bare chest, all over his arms - the shock of the cold and the taste . . . he couldn't stand it. He spat again and again, but couldn't clear it, couldn't make the taste go away. It lingered in the corners of his mouth, in the lines of his sore gums, in the creases of his cracked lips.

"_This is going to kill me_!" he screamed at Gibbs, dashing the bottle down in the sink. "Is that what you want? Huh? Option number three? I can think of a few better ways to go!"

"You have to drink something," Gibbs said.

No matter how much he shouted, he couldn't do anything with Gibbs. Maybe phantom-McGee would have taken off when he started screaming, but Gibbs just crossed his arms and repeated his order: drink something. Anything. Dying of thirst, Gibbs assured him, had to be one of the worst ways to go, and he could have however long he wanted to think about _that_, except he, Gibbs, knew well enough that if it were up to Tony, he wouldn't realize that he needed water until he was too weak to get up and get it.

"So drink some," Gibbs said, finishing.

"You're trying to kill me."

"If you don't drink it, you'll die. I'm trying to convince you to get something in your system."

Tony looked at the bottle, still halfway full of orange-tinted water, visible pipe-matter floating up like motes in a beam of light. His stomach churned just looking at it. "I'll puke," he said. "I'll get sick again, no more food . . ."

"Dinozzo. You don't have any other options."

"Toilet," he said. "Toilet water."

"It's just as rusty, and you know it. Suck it up and take a drink."

"I hate you," he whispered, picking up the bottle. His hand squeezed it and water burbled up in the plastic, threatening again to spill. "I hate you, I hate you, I hate you _so damn much_, you _bastard_ - you don't know what it's like . . ."

"Drink," Gibbs said. "Stay alive. And when I find you, you can tell me what it's like. You can make me understand."

Tony raised the bottle, tilted it back, and swallowed without tasting, just trying to get it down. He drank as quickly as he could, his Adam's apple moving in jerks as he gulped the second the water reached his throat, and then the bottle was empty. He threw it across the bathroom and it bounced weakly against the tiles, rolled to rest at the opposite wall. His lips were shaded orange, and sore from the force he'd used when he'd clamped the bottle to his lips, sore from sucking at the steady flow of liquid. His stomach roiled, rebelling, and Tony pressed both hands to his abdomen. No way. Not going to throw up. Not going to let this out of him. Not going to have to do it again so soon.

A cramp ripped through him and he dropped to his knees, head hanging. He curled on his side, hands trapped between his aching belly and his thighs.

It was McGee who sat down next to his head. "You won't die from drinking rusty water," McGee said. "Nobody dies from that." He sounded like he knew what he was talking about, had that lifted chin and steady gaze that he only had when he was absolutely sure. "It's not the rust that's the problem. There's something in the water besides that. Whatever is in the pipes is coming out in the water. You're right - it's not safe to drink."

"Tell that to Gibbs." He moaned as another cramp hit. He bit down, hard, and his teeth sliced into his tongue. Warm, wet blood filled his mouth. "He said to do it."

"He's right," McGee said automatically, nodding. "You need water more than anything else. Even if this is what's going to happen every time you drink. Pain doesn't mean that it'll kill you, but you know that you'll die if you stop drinking anything at all."

"Maybe better - devil I know . . . devil I don't."

"Not in this case." That was Kate. She lay down beside him, folded her hands under her head. Even though Tony knew the floor was filthy, it didn't seem to bother Kate, who looked untouchable, perfectly clean. She smelled like lilac soap and shampoo, glittered with the gold watch on her wrist and the necklace around her neck, sparkled with the diamonds in her ears. "Cavalry's coming, Tony."

"Okay." He didn't believe her, but he closed his eyes, just inhaled the sensations he was adding by imagining her. "Good."

-()

The next day, he thought that his window was bigger - that it became the size of the whole wall. It opened up into the outside, into rich green lawns and buildings the perfect white of piped icing, into golden lights that glowed in rooms filled with people he knew and trusted. It had sights and sounds and smells, bright with all the possibilities he could hardly imagine anymore, and it glistened; it glimmered; it drew his eyes until he could look at nothing else, could not move, even when Gibbs shouted in one of his ears and Kate shouted in the other, urging him up and for more water. He couldn't move even if he wanted to, not to drink, not even to find the glass and scratch the days into his skin. He just looked out his window at the most gorgeous things that he had ever seen, so mind-blowing, so beautiful that he cried.


	2. Gibbs I

Thank you _so _much for all your replies - I'm overwhelmed. This chapter asks a few more questions about Tony's confinement, but they'll all be answered by the end of the story: writer's honor.

-()

The Window: **Gibbs (I)**

He wasn't a man who liked waiting.

When he had gone after Ari, he had gone after him knowing that the chase was going to be long, and even then, he had still been impatient. He had stalked around the office, burning midnight oil and forcing others to join him, and he knew that it had been unbearable. He'd known that even then but hadn't cared - the chase was too important and the quarry too valuable for him to care.

He had gone after Dinozzo expecting that he would find Tony in a day, but even in the first twenty-four golden hours after Tony's disappearance, he had felt the tension in him build to the breaking point. After the first forty-eight, he had rehearsed in his head everything he would do to the people who had _dared_ to take Tony Dinozzo and not return him, immediately, and God _help_ them if Tony was bruised. He'd thought about bruises because he hadn't been able to think about anything else. So he had yelled at them to make the searches work faster, to trace the leads they didn't have, and he had thought about all the things he would do when he found Tony. He had sipped his coffee and thought about shattered kneecaps and ripping their throats out, and he had smiled.

After the first week, the ideas had come whether he had wanted them or not. He would wake up with his hands curled into fists and leveled over his heart so that he could feel it pounding, trying to break out of his ribs. He'd rub the nightmares out of his eyes and spend the rest of the night in the office, trying to wrap his head around the why and how - but mostly the where. And he would be sitting there with his head in his hands when Kate would come up and hand him a coffee and explain that she hadn't been able to sleep, either, and they both put their heads together and came up with - nothing.

At the end of the first month, he had heard Kate say to McGee that he'd broken more computer units this month alone than in the last year.

All they had was a note. Dinozzo had disappeared into thin air and all they had left of him was a note pinned to a door - a note with generic ink, generic paper, and no fingerprints. Just a plain sheet of white paper with one word: _Look_. So Gibbs did, even though he hated following orders. He looked. They all did.

At the end of the second month, he was told that his first priority could no longer be official.

Gibbs had stayed in that night, despite everyone's attempts to surround him and keep him from seeing the broadcast that beamed across the airwaves at eleven, telling the world that he had stopped looking. Gibbs had watched the careful, emotionless message, and felt nothing at all. They had moved on to other stories, and he had been sitting across his bed with the remote next to his thigh, his eyes unblinking until midnight. All he could think about was what he had been trying to ignore: that Dinozzo could be dead. It was like an assault into the emptiness, the fear filling up the places in his head that couldn't be occupied by Tony himself. He would see Tony dead, and then he would think about how much he would hurt them, how much they would have to pay. Everything done to Tony times ten. Times ten thousand.

After that, he was surprised that they hadn't all left.

If Tony had been there, he would have been able to diffuse some of the tension. He would have drawn it onto himself, cracked a terrible joke, and let Gibbs yell without any of it making a single impression on him, his face just saying that he'd seen it all before and would see it all again. If Tony had been there, though, there would have been no reason for any of it - Tony was the reason he needed Tony.

He caught them all grieving when they thought he wasn't looking, and it inexplicably touched him, that they thought they had to protect him. He saw Kate marking off the days on her calendar, little X's in the very corner, and he saw the way the corners of her mouth tightened when she did it, how when she capped the pen and slid it back into her desk, she looked like she might cry. He saw how McGee would never, ever sit down at Tony's desk - not so much to use his computer or to take a sheet of paper from the printer. He left it untouched, and by unspoken agreement, they had all done the same - but Gibbs had been stepping out of the elevator when a gunny had tried to lift a pencil from Tony's cup, and McGee - _McGee_, of all people - had practically ripped him a new asshole, gesturing all over the place and explaining that it was _Tony's_ desk, _Special Agent Dinozzo's _desk, and _not to touch it_.

He saw Abby with dark circles under her eyes from late nights spent staring at that note and its lack of evidence. And Ducky was all around them, talking about Tony when no one else dared to mention him, managing more than anyone else to talk Gibbs down from another peak of burning rage. It was Ducky he had been talking to in autopsy when the subject had turned to Tony's disappearance and the people who had taken him. Ducky had commented on how much he would enjoy "cutting them open - after you kill them, of course, Jethro."

He wasn't Kate. He didn't have to count off days on his calendar. He had the numbers fixed in his mind, and they were the first thing he saw every morning when he woke up. The only problem was that they kept getting bigger, when even the one had been too much.

The day the number became one hundred, he went to the gym and attacked a punching bag until the seams split. No one said a word, but he could hear the calculators in their minds running, practically see them counting backwards on their fingers until he heard the whispers: _Dinozzo. One hundred days._

And then, on day one hundred seventy-one, they found him.

-()

Bryant Hale was not what Gibbs had expected.

When they had put all of the pieces together and narrowed it down to the one name, Gibbs had thought that any man who could have stolen Dinozzo and come out of it whole would have been a man to be reckoned with - a stone wall, a steel giant. But the man they found was scrawny, pale, and mushroom-like - looking as if he had grown too long in the dark. Sitting in front of the glowing computer screens that made up his world, he was a McGee gone bad - manipulating and toying with someone else's world through a series of keystrokes and punched numbers. He had sweaty palms and three days worth of pale blonde stubble growing over his face. And this was the man who had led them on a chase for their agent for six months, this was the man that they had caught only by a stroke of good luck - only because he had been hacking into their system to see how the search for Dinozzo was going, and Abby and McGee had teamed up and traced his signal. This was their super-genius and their second Ari.

_This_ was the man that Gibbs wanted to kill so badly that he pushed Hale against the monitors before he could even ask a question - taking out six months of inaction, frustration, and pain as best he could, trying to condense his rage into one quick smash against the consoles.

"Where is he?"

Hale giggled, one damp palm cupped over his mouth. "Don't worry, Special Agent Gibbs. I didn't even bruise him. Didn't even touch him."

He shoved Hale back. "I'm sorry, that doesn't answer my question. I'm going to ask again, and if I don't get an answer, I'm going to start eliminating a few unnecessary body parts for you. Where is Agent Dinozzo? Where are you keeping him?"

"Down the hall," Hale said, but Gibbs didn't think his threat had really done the job, because Hale still had that nervous, goofy smile on his face.

"Kate. Hold him. If he moves, blow his brains out."

Kate drew her weapon. "Absolutely."

Gibbs didn't waste time after that. If he was on his way to Tony when he happened to hear a gunshot, he was convinced that would only be for the better. He moved down the hall, and midway through, broke into a run, because he'd waited six months for this, and maybe another second _would _be too much. However short the distance, it was still more than enough time to think of a dozen things to find in the room at the end of the hall. A corpse was first to come to mind, an endless shutter-film of possible deaths.

At the end of the hall was a door. He didn't even have to kick it down, there was just a line of sliding steel bolts that he threw to one side.

And then he opened the door, and there was Tony.

Gibbs almost closed the door again, almost went back to Kate and told her grimly that they'd had it wrong, that Hale didn't have Tony after all, but he had someone else penned up in that room, and that Hale was probably the sickest man he had ever seen, bar none, because what the man in that room looked like - it was beyond belief. How sick. How sad. But Tony was his responsibility and this man was not . . .

Except it really was Tony.

Tony was naked, crouched at the end of the bed, wrapped mummy-tight in the rattiest, dirtiest sheet Gibbs had ever seen. His eyes were unfocused, his jaw hanging slack - he looked drugged. The sheet wasn't thick enough to conceal how emaciated he had become, and it couldn't have been enough to keep him warm. The room temperature couldn't have been far above fifty degrees, but Gibbs barely felt it. He had wanted to do nothing but take action for the last half-year, but now he had found Tony and he was just standing in the doorway of Tony's prison, staring.

The way Tony was staring at the wall, his eyes glass and wide.

Gibbs put the gun back at this side, which was at least something he knew he had to do, but once it was done, he was again clueless and motionless.

He said Tony's name.

Tony turned towards him and smiled automatically. "Not time to drink yet. Not thirsty. Want to sit?"

"Tony, I'm here to get you out."

"Yeah, yeah. I know. Coming. Option number four. Hey, boss, what's the number?"

Gibbs didn't know what to say, and he turned into a parrot, just repeating the last thing said. "Number?"

"Yeah. Day. How many?"

That was something Gibbs knew - the number of days Tony had been missing. He could have pared it down to hours and minutes, if Tony had asked. With a few minutes to do the extra calculations, he could have given it in seconds.

"It's been one hundred seventy-one days, Dinozzo."

Tony nodded wearily. "Better start a new one," he said, which made no more sense to Gibbs than if Tony had replied in Swahili. But then Tony shifted, the sheet fell down around his waist, and Gibbs saw what Tony took for granted, what Tony intended to start all over again on his right hip - horizontal slashes, some of them pinkish scars, some of them healing scabs, and some of them were rubbed raw and still oozing blood. Tony's hand, previously buried in the sheet, moved, and Gibbs saw a reflective glimmer and finally had something to do.

He crossed the room in an instant and pulled the glass from Tony's hand. It cut into his own fingers, and, looking at the blood dried on the jagged edges, he dropped it in disgust.

Tony sighed. "What? You think - you're McGee?"

There was something wrong with his voice. It was choked, breathy, as if Tony had to struggle to get the words past some impossible stumbling block.

"What did he _do_ to you?"

Tony blinked at him, big green eyes utterly without comprehension. "McGee? Nothing. That damned fourth option. You know what that is yet? Kate won't tell. She knows, though." He peered hopefully at Gibbs, his expression far too open to be completely sane. "You'd tell me? The fourth option?"

Gibbs put one hand on his shoulder. "If I find it, I'll tell you, I promise."

Tony started underneath his hand, and for the first time since Gibbs had entered the room, his eyes showed promise of an awareness and a horrible sanity. His mouth trembled as he backed away, legs shifting and arms pulling to crawl to the other side of the bed.

"You don't touch," Tony said. "You never touch. Never ever. Against the rules. Not even in the window. Can't touch. Not real. Ghost. Um, shadow." He made a snapping noise with his fingers that sounded too much like bones breaking, and a grin broke out on his face until Tony was just a grinning skull. "Hallucination! Right? Not real. Not option one."

Gibbs moved to the other side of the bed and put his hand on Tony's shoulder again. "I'm here, Tony. I'm real. You can leave now, I'm going to take you home."

"Go through the window?"

There was no window, and he couldn't begin to understand what Tony was talking about. He kept his hand there, kept his eyes intent on Tony's. "No, Dinozzo, through the door."

Tony cringed. "I'm sorry. Couldn't find the way. Couldn't get it open. I know. Hopeless. Pathetic. You said, the first time. I tried, I really did, but it still doesn't open. No way. Nothing's different. Nothing's changed." His lips crinkled, not in a smile this time, but in an effort to hold back tears. "I'm sorry. I'll drink if you want. Water doesn't make me as sick now."

"The water makes you sick?"

"McGee says it's not the rust," Tony informed him. "Says: something in the pipes."

He was going to break every single bone Bryant Hale had to offer, not just break it, but shatter it into a hundred million fragments, one splinter for every thing that was wrong about this situation. The hollowed-out look in Tony's eyes; the length of days; the scars and healing scratches; the ground-up bloody glass; the every rib he could see underneath Tony's skin; the chill of the room; the whatever-it-was in the water that made Tony loath to take the one thing that was probably comforting. Broken bones for the length of Tony's hair, for Tony's rambles, and for Tony's isolation.

He moved his hand from Tony's shoulder into his hair, feeling awkward but knowing that touch was the only thing getting through to him. Touch was what he hadn't had, left alone for so long.

"Can you walk?"

Tony closed his eyes. "Gotta lean against the walls."

"Not this time, Dinozzo. You can lean against me."

He wrapped one arm around Dinozzo's shoulders and helped him upright. Tony swayed alarmingly when he was on his feet, but then his legs seemed to steady. Holding himself by the bed, he managed to stand alone while Gibbs draped the sheet around him, hating to keep that bloodstained, filthy thing with them any longer, but he had a feeling that Tony wouldn't thank him later for being traipsed out in front of Kate stark naked. He took a moment to arrange the sheet almost like a toga around Dinozzo, and then put his arm back to help hold him up. After a few fumbling steps, he held steady. He still listed towards Gibbs as they walked to the door, but he wasn't falling flat on his face, and that was something. When they got to the open door, Tony stood there, smiling at it.

"Like another window," he said, sounding tired and satisfied.

Gibbs wasn't going to stand there and debate terminology: Tony had been in this damned place too long. _He _had been there too long, and it couldn't have been much more than five minutes. Kate must be worried, standing there outside with each second ticking away like an hour, her gun trained on Hale - and Gibbs wondered how much it had cost her to not turn her head and call back to them, not to head to the door and check that they were fine. Kate was a professional: she kept her eyes on her target. Time to go and relieve her. Time to go and relieve all of them.

He stepped through and took Tony with him.

Tony went still underneath his arm, resisting any motion. One look showed that his eyes had dilated, going from the lightning-bright room to the relative darkness of the hall, but that wasn't the only reason for the abrupt and terrible fear that was freezing him in place.

"You're going home now, Tony," he said.

"Home," Tony echoed, and the look he gave Gibbs was absolutely naked, ready to be either consoled or completely destroyed. "Real?"

He squeezed Tony's shoulder. "Real. I promise."

Tony nodded slowly. "Trust you," he said softly. "You said you would. Didn't really believe when they said - you weren't coming."

Six months of guilt wrapped around him and threatened to pull away all the light and air he had left. But now wasn't the time to be suffocated by everything that had happened to Tony, now was the time to piece him back together, and when Tony was back at work, back chasing skirts, and back running his mouth - _then_ Gibbs could indulge his _mea culpa_. Not now. He didn't have time - he had Tony. But it had been so long: if they'd only been able to find him sooner, even just by a day - if only their real lead to Hale had been more than just an accident a bored Abby had taken an interest in - if only . . .

He resisted the line of thinking because he had never been one to try and turn back the clock: even with his marriages, he accepted the time of death with those and never attempted resurrection. But this wasn't a union or a lost opportunity - this was Dinozzo, someone who had trusted him and then been stolen and kept like an animal in a cage.

_Not now. He doesn't have time for my guilt._

Tony moved against him anxiously. "Don't go away. Please."

He tried to answer, but his voice deserted him, and all he could do was shuffle forward, an awkward contestant in a three-legged race. He called forward to Kate that Tony was safe and that they were both coming, and was torn between asking her to get Hale out of Tony's sight before they reached him - to shove him in the car so hard that his skull cracked open on the line of roof and door in an unfortunate, unforeseen accident - and telling her that she could come and see him, but Kate resolved any of his indecision by making the choice herself. She came along the hall, dragging Hale by the collar, the barrel of her gun still pressed against his collarbone.

Her arm went lax at the sight of Tony, but steadied before Hale could even notice that she had dropped her guard. If anything, the gun dug deeper against his skin.

"Hey, Tony," she said.

If her voice trembled, Gibbs didn't notice it. She sounded almost casual, as if Tony had walked into the office on any ordinary morning, and any minute, she was going to ask him to get her some coffee, since he was already going by the community pot.

Tony gave her a wide smile. "Hey, Kate. I found it."

Gibbs tightened his arm around Tony's shoulders. "What did you find?"

"Fourth option," Tony said wearily. "Got it now, right? Tell McGee. This is better than anything. Or is it number two? Seems good enough . . . either way. Missed you, Kate. Boss," he added, leaning his head against Gibbs's shoulder in a gesture that was almost childlike in its affection. "Dreamed you came. It was nice. Not like this, but nice. Who's he?"

Gibbs was having trouble following Tony's new concept of conversation, its frequent changes in topic not helped by his staccato sentences. Kate understood, though, and shoved Hale against the wall.

"He's nobody, Tony," she said, her voice steely, as if daring Hale to object.

Tony nodded seriously. "Me too."

The words were like ice down Gibbs's neck, and he barely resisted the urge to pull Tony a little closer. _Nobody_. How long had _that _little mental revision taken? Sixty days? Seventy? A hundred? How many days left all alone had it taken before Tony had lost himself completely? It was basic psychology - human beings needed contact, needed affirmation of their own existence to feel real. So long had it taken before Tony had had to create his own affirmation in whatever hallucinations he could subconsciously conjure? How long before he'd invented that damn window he'd been talking about?

Hale was laughing, the sounds muffled against the wall. "Guess you're too late, Agent Gibbs. It's a shame - he tried very hard to hold himself together. You should have heard some of those conversations he had with himself, always trying to find the boundary between dead and insane. And he did such a good job for such a long time. I think he finally lost it when he ran out of water."

_Water makes me sick,_ Tony's matter-of-fact explanation echoed in his mind.

_Oh you son-of-a-bitch. Wasn't enough to keep him locked away, wasn't enough to watch him lose his mind, you were letting him starve to death - letting him try to keep down contaminated water just to survive and you know what, Hale? I think he did it. I think he lasted a hell of a lot longer than you thought he would, because he always does. And we'll take it from here, and I'll break every bone in your body into a million pieces - one fragment for every thing that's wrong about this situation._

"Agent Todd, shut him up!"

She'd been stunned motionless, but now she came alive and nodded at him, forcing Hale back down the hallway. "I'll radio for backup and take him in," she said over her shoulder. "Get Tony to a hospital."

_No, Kate, I was thinking about putting him back in that room for a while, just to see how he'd react._

He squashed his bitterness. He couldn't blame Kate for this. He gave her a curt nod and refocused on Tony, who'd been waiting very quietly, observing them - the way he'd probably watched his imaginary outside world while he was in the room.

Gibbs patted his shoulder. "Let's get you somewhere else," he said, deciding that the idea of an elsewhere would probably do more to appeal to Tony right now than anything else.

Tony's face lit up at the idea. "Outside?"

"All the way out," he agreed, helping Tony walk to the door once he'd given Kate and Hale a twenty-count to clear the area. "Wherever you want to go."

Tony tugged on his sleeve, and again, the childishness morphed into that dreadful remaining sanity, and Gibbs could barely stand to look at him. It was almost easier when Tony barely understood what was happening - but this presence of mind was almost unbearable, because the insanity was gentler, but whatever understanding Tony had left had decidedly gone sour.

"What is it, Dinozzo?"

"It's just a damned _dream_," Tony said fiercely, "it's just a dream and you're not real. I know you're not real because Gibbs never came and I never left, I'm still there - this is just a dream." He rubbed a hand over his eyes, even though he wasn't crying. "You never came. I waited and you never came, and then they said that you weren't even looking anymore. I'm sorry for whatever I did, I'm sorry I wasn't a good agent, and I'll stay back there if you want - but don't make me dream about you and then have me wake up again."

"You're not dreaming, Tony," Gibbs said, trying to find some way to make the truth sound believable. "Hey, how do we know that _I'm _not dreaming? I've had a few of my own, you know."

Tony sighed. "You're too nice to be Gibbs."

That stung more than he'd expected, but at least it was something he could work with.

"Well, what do I have to do to convince you that I'm myself?"

Tony glared at him defiantly. "Hit me."

"You want to get _punched_, Dinozzo?"

"Back of the head," Tony said, not giving an inch. He'd gone from compliant to resistant in under a minute, gaining confidence and verbal skills once he thought that he was dreaming. "Like you always did before."

He'd been dragging Tony by the arm but now he stopped, his hand sliding up underneath Tony's shoulder and into a fold in the sheet, fingers suddenly encased in bloody cotton. "Are you _crazy_?" The choice of words made him wince, but he bulldozed through his own doubt. "I don't even know if you have a concussion, I don't know what's wrong with you, and you look like a breeze is going to send you into kingdom come - _forget _about getting hit."

Tony leaned against him in a gesture that Gibbs was sure he meant to be intimidating, but because of how thin he had gotten, it was more pathetic, as if Tony were falling and needed someone to catch him.

"If I wake up," Tony said, "I'm not going to go in there and have some more _water_." He said _water_ the way most people said _poison_. "I'm going to cut deep, forget what McGee has to say about it."

Cut deep. When the sheet shifted over Tony's shoulder, Gibbs could see the tally marks and the numbers spelling out in hieroglyphics exactly how much this had cost him.

He tightened his hand on Tony. "You're not going to wake up. It's not a dream. We came to get you. It - it took a long time, Tony, but we're here."

Tony nodded as if he understood, gave him a dreamy smile, and then he fell forward, the last strings holding him together coming undone. Gibbs was barely able to catch him before he hit the floor. He turned him over, felt his pulse, and was relieved it was still there: uneven, but present. Time to get him to a hospital - time to get Tony out of this box and into someplace real.

-()

Once he'd secured Tony in the backseat of the car, he found his cell phone and dialed NCIS headquarters, holding it so tightly in his hand that he could almost hear the plastic cracking underneath his fingers. It rang three times before McGee finally picked up, sounding out-of-breath, as if he'd had to run across the office to find the phone.

"NCIS, Agent McGee speaking."

"McGee!"

"Yeah, boss?"

Gibbs saw his smile in the rearview mirror, a hard slash of teeth and thinned lips. Victory, sure, but the grimmest victory he'd ever known. "We've got him, McGee. We're on our way to the hospital. Meet us here - bring Abby and Ducky. He'll want to see someone familiar." _As long as you can manage to convince him that you're real_.

"Is he all right?"

"No," Gibbs said shortly. He peeled off the narrow road and into full-blown traffic, wishing he had a siren so that he would have free rein over the other cars on the road. "No, McGee, he's not. Come anyway." He suddenly remembered what Tony had been saying before, and added, "Do you have any idea what he's talking about when he mentions a fourth option? He seems to think you'd know something about it."

He heard McGee hesitate, thinking it over. "No," McGee said finally. "I don't know."

"It was worth a try." Probably the fourth option was something Dinozzo had invented to keep himself from becoming catatonic along with insane, but Gibbs hadn't been sure. Whatever Dinozzo had imagined, there had to be some kind of reason behind it - and the fourth option, as well as options one through three, had to mean something, the way the imaginary window obviously did. "If you think of anything, let me know."

"Absolutely," McGee said. "I'll - I'll go get them."

Gibbs closed his phone and watched Tony in the mirror, instead of studying the traffic. He forced himself to be dispassionate, to not care about the cargo he was bearing north, to not think at all about how Tony had been waiting for them. He made himself study Tony the way crime scenes were supposed to be studied, to examine him like a puzzle that needed to be reassembled.

He was pale from lack of sunlight, and even the glare through the car windows would probably give him a hell of a sunburn before they got to the hospital. Gibbs could see the veins and bones in his exposed hands, his skin having gotten papery thin enough to barely cover the framework it was wrapped around. Malnourishment, but he couldn't estimate to the extent, not until he talked to the doctors or at least examined whatever Tony had had to eat. All he knew was that Tony had lost enough weight to classify as a gift-wrapped skeleton, still lively enough to be stumbling around. His hair had gotten absurdly long, down past his shoulders, but the beard wasn't nearly to that extent - still bad, for a man who had always been clean-shaven, but Tony had obviously had some way of keeping it short before that he'd either lost or grown unable to use as things had progressed. He was filthy, hair matted with sweat and grease, as tacky with blood as the sheet he was currently cocooned in. Naked, although Gibbs had seen clothes in the corner. He thought that Tony's current birthday suit had less to do with insanity and more to do with necessity - the heap of fabric he'd seen back in that room had looked like it would barely qualify for cleaning rags. Tony must have worn it to tatters with constant use and harsh scrubbings of soap, until one of his last holds on humanity had turned into a useless scrap heap. He'd ingested some kind of toxin, because Tony had said that the water made him sick - he'd mentioned something about rust, but immediately added that that wasn't the problem, because "McGee" told him that it was really something in the pipes that was causing the nausea. He had ladder-marks of scars and healing gashes up and down both arms, and a few facial scars that Gibbs almost didn't want to understand.

And he might be insane.

Scratch that, he _knew_ that Dinozzo currently didn't qualify anywhere near sanity. It wasn't a lack of marbles rolling around, it was that he had too many. He'd been dreaming of rescue, but Gibbs thought that wasn't part of his delirium - not as much as the window he'd been talking about and the apparent conversations he had been holding with people he hadn't seen in over six months.

Gibbs thought he could forgive Dinozzo for any kind of insanity he could bring to the table, because it wasn't like Gibbs hadn't had his own ideas of confrontation and conversation over the time Dinozzo had been missing. On one memorable occasion, investigating a midshipman who had supposedly hung himself, he had yelled at Kate to go find Tony and tell him to get his ass over here. The silence that followed had been enough to make him want to leave altogether, just storm off and leave the investigation in Kate's hands - the way she had been looking at him, the way McGee had shrunk against the wall, the way Ducky's hand had felt on his shoulder, and his voice calmly saying, "Maybe you should get some air, Jethro." It had been too much. It had been, well - _crazy_.

And now crazy was strapped into the backseat of his car while they were going seventy miles an hour in a fifty mile an hour zone, a rocket launched in a direction that he was barely able to control with a steering wheel and years of training. The cars lashed around him, blurs of painted steel, and Gibbs wasn't just driving to get somewhere, he was driving to put distance between the two of them and whatever had happened, whatever had gone so deadly wrong in that little room.

The sunny day around him was a bad joke. Tony was going to wake up with blisters on all of his exposed skin, and it would just be one more humiliation added on to the total he'd already mounted up.

He finally made it to the hospital in what he was sure had to be some kind of record, which should have meant something but somehow didn't. What meant something was how his hands started to shake when he reached for the handle of the car, and how feather-light Tony felt as Gibbs brought him upright. Tony stirred against his shoulder, eyelids fluttering, and said hoarsely, "Boss?"

"Right here, Dinozzo. You want to help me get you inside?"

"Inside . . ." Tony's face blanked and, if possible, went even whiter than before, and he started to struggle. As wasted as he was, it was like struggling with a dried-out leaf, but it was clear that Tony was putting everything he had into the fight, weak fists hammering against Gibbs's chest. "Don't take me back. Don't put me back in there."

"Tony." He caught one of Tony's fists in his hand. "I'm not taking you back there. No one's taking you back there. No one will _ever_ make you go back _there_. I'm taking you to the hospital. You -" He almost laughed. "You're in pretty bad shape, Dinozzo. Someone's got to put all your pieces back in the right places again, and I can't do it all by myself. We're going to get you some professionals and they'll -"

What? What would they do? Maybe he could convince a Tony Dinozzo half-out-of-his-mind with hunger and isolation that it would be child's play for a real doctor to reassemble him, and maybe it would be simple enough to rehydrate him and add back a few layers of cushion between the world and his bones, but Gibbs had an idea that it would be much, much harder to fix what was happening inside Tony's head.

It didn't matter if he believed it or not - what mattered was that he convinced Dinozzo, who was still looking at him with shaky fear and a pleading need for reassurance.

"The doctors will be able to help you," Gibbs said finally. "And we'll get Ducky to give you all your regular checkups and you'll be back being a pain in the ass before we know it."

To say that Tony walked into the emergency room on his own free will would have been a vast exaggeration, but he at least allowed himself to be dragged there without anymore escape attempts, although when the electronic doors closed behind them and cut off the immediate view of open space, Tony went rigid with fear. Gibbs talked to him, never sure exactly what he was saying, but at least trying to soothe Tony so that those locked knees would start to move again and get them closer to the medical attention Tony obviously needed. After another few desperate, half-falling steps, with Tony clinging to him like a life raft, Gibbs began to regret not having called an ambulance. Maybe in his head, the reason for taking Tony himself was because the flashing lights and strangers would frighten Tony and send him into deeper shock, but the truth of it had been that he hadn't wanted to let Tony out of his sight. Now he thought he might need an ambulance just to get Tony into the waiting room.

Luckily, one of the great truths of the world was that no one who was pulling along an immobile, emaciated man wrapped in a bloody sheet had to spend very much time in a waiting room.

They were ushered - well, Tony was ushered, Gibbs just refused to go anywhere else - into a room immediately, doctors moving around them in a swarm. Gibbs distinctively heard at least one person say in a reverential voice, "Holy _shit_." He glared in the general direction of the whisper, cutting a swathe through the innocently confused faces until someone in the back went a dark shade of red and busied themselves hooking Dinozzo up with an IV.

"Sir, you really need to leave," someone said, trying to work around him and only succeeding in bumping into him three times. "We'll inform you on his condition as soon as he's stabilized."

Gibbs found his badge. "He's one of mine."

The doctor examined the ID for a moment before turning her attention back to her patient. "Stand in the corner, at least. You're interfering."

He backed into a featureless meeting of walls, grateful that at least no one had asked him what had happened to "one of his", grateful that no one had sent an accusatory glance his way, although God knew he deserved one. He was also _profoundly_ grateful that Tony's flickering awareness had shifted back into unconsciousness, either from fear or exhaustion. He couldn't handle the incessant _noise_ Dinozzo had been making in the back of his throat - he'd sounded like a trapped animal, pleading to be released.

The doctors barked meaningless things at each other over Tony's prone body, and Gibbs just tried to concentrate on taking in the basics. Most of it was stuff he had already realized: malnutrition, muscle loss, various superficial wounds. Gibbs looked at the ugly horizontal tallies on Tony's arms, like ladders descending from the scars of the numbers, and wondered how the hell anything like that managed to be classified as superficial, no matter how shallow the cuts were. When someone started using their own body as a timekeeper, they had moved beyond any diagnosis that included the word "superficial".

Finally, the same woman who had spoken to him gave the machines a once-over and said, "He's stable." _Now _the questions started. "Would you mind telling someone how on earth he managed to get in this condition?" And there _it_ was - the barest whiff of accusation.

She was pitying Tony; Tony, who, if things had been right instead of so unbelievably wrong, would have already managed to secure her phone number into his cell. That somehow hurt more than his own guilt, the sudden flash of reminder at how Tony should have been, just a hideous reminder from his memories to complement the view before him.

He said coldly, "How much of the news did you watch a few months ago, doctor? That's Special Agent Tony Dinozzo, missing for six months and found maybe an hour ago. And that's everything I can tell you without getting more information myself - that he disappeared and now we have him. He wasn't really in the right mood to tell me all the details about whatever hell he's been through, but I intend to find out. Extensively. Now, instead of _you_ asking _me _questions, why don't you try giving me a few answers?"

She surprised him. "How much do you think he weighed six months ago?"

His mind raced back to all the physicals that had been given, and tried to come up with an accurate representation. "Around one-ninety. Ten-fifteen pounds in either direction. It's not my specialty of observation."

"It's not mine, either, but I'm guessing he'd be lucky to tip the scales at one-thirty, as is."

When he had Bryant Hale in interrogation -

It was best not to think about that. The anticipation right now would only distract him. He curled his hands into tight fists and tried to focus, tried to somehow compute that weight loss and force it to make sense in terms of Tony. In terms of anyone at all. It wasn't supposed to be the kind of thing he could visualize, but, damn his luck, he had a full-body visual aid right in front of him, now swathed in a loose hospital gown and tucked between starched sheets. He could think of at least sixty pounds gone and then compare that figure to the hollow, gaunt look of Tony's face. Lucky, lucky him. No abstract thinking involved.

She moved a clipboard into a different position. "He isn't as dehydrated as he is malnourished. He's had something to drink -"

"Water," Gibbs said. "I know he had some." He was thinking about Bryant Hale saying, _"I think he finally lost it when he ran out of water." _But then Tony had said that the water from the faucet made him sick - but there had been the litter of plastic bottles around the bare room. "Probably most of it was pure, but he's had some contaminated."

"How much?"

"I don't know."

"How long?"

"I don't _know_." He drove a fist into his thigh. "Not that he wasn't in a talking mood, it was just that nothing he said made a lot of sense."

She checked his ID again. "Special Agent Gibbs. Why don't you go and wait outside?"

"He'll want me to be here when he wakes up," Gibbs said.

It was probably true - without his presence, Tony would probably be convinced that he was back in the room and he might even try to "cut deep" the way he had threatened. The hospital room did bear a certain resemblance to the sterile prison Tony had called home. But even if that hadn't been the case, Gibbs didn't want to leave him alone again.

"He won't be waking up anytime soon," she said coolly. "We're going to keep him under sedation for a while to get his strength up with the IVs. When we wake him, someone will come and get you. I don't think you'll be hard to find."

Gibbs couldn't find an argument rational enough to appeal to those steel-cold eyes, so he nodded and added an addendum that if Dinozzo woke up and he wasn't there, there would be hell to pay. He was hard-pressed to define what kind of hell, and counted himself fortunate that the doctor accepted this with a mildly-amused nod before shooing him out of the room. Well, he had promised Dinozzo medical professionals, and that was exactly what he had gotten.

He turned the corner and collided with Abby, eyes widening in temporary chill-shock as cold liquid spilled over his shirt when her Caff-Pow tilted into his chest.

"Warm welcome, Abs," he said.

She was flanked by McGee and Ducky, Kate apparently still with Hale, and all of them looked anxious, strained between being concerned and being happy, making their smiles look like ghastly, clown-painted parodies of tense muscles and flushed faces. If Ducky looked a little calmer than the rest, it was only conditioning and experience that allowed him to appear a little less haggard.

"How is he?"

"He's - alive," Gibbs said.

"Oh dear," Ducky said. "An opening like that usually indicates that life is the only good news you'll have to give to us."

"Life is good enough," Abby said, lifting her chin. "Yesterday, we didn't even have that."

McGee didn't say anything, he was staring at Gibbs with a look of deep concentration, as if he were able to flip open his mind, rifle through his memories, and come up with an accurate picture of Tony, complete with statistical references and footnotes. It was how he usually looked when he was bent over a computer with Abby at his side, two pairs of hands hammering into a keyboard in an odd unity, tongue and teeth against his lower lip until it was grooved and damp. Whatever he was looking for, he didn't find anything, because the brief flicker of disappointment showed from underneath the intent, and then Super McGee was just McGee again, a little bashful and a little confused.

Ducky finally broke the silence. "How bad are things, Jethro?"

"When I walked into that room," he said, trying to keep his voice level as if restraint would tell them more about how grave it had been than any outright rage, "I was the first person Tony had seen since he went missing. That's how bad things are."

McGee was the one who spoke, slowly and with growing horror, trying to reason things out as if, he offered enough sensible reasons as to why this was too terrible to have happened, he could turn back time and make it not be true after all.

"Tony's been . . . alone?"

"As far as I know, and as far as I was able to figure out from Hale, Tony was placed in one room and he never left it." He realized that his hands were shaking and he shoved them into his pockets. "When I found him, he . . . didn't understand what was happening. He thought it was a - a dream."

_Dream _wasn't really an accurate synonym for _hallucination_, but it was as close as Gibbs was willing to get. If he played things right, Tony's fluid conception of reality could stay between Kate and himself. Insanity was a black mark that Tony's record probably couldn't stand against.

"If you talk to him, touch him," he continued. "It makes me feel better."

Any other time, he thought bitterly, and this would have made them all laugh. Kate, had she been there, would have been smirking, saying: _You want us to hold Tony's hand and lead him through the big bad adult conversations? Keep his attention from wandering? Oh, yeah. I'm sure he's going to love it - any excuse to throw in a little sideways pass . . . _and Abby would have been wide-mouthed at the mental image of Gibbs making his way down a cold concrete hallway with Tony looped around his arm like a debutante. McGee would have flushed, trying to hold in laughter, and Ducky would have smiled indulgently at how foolish they all were, secretly amused himself.

Now they nodded gravely, all in unison, an orchestrated row of bobbing heads, and Gibbs would laugh if the curious obstruction in his throat could be moved.

They all look confused; grief-stricken; exhausted; betrayed.

It was the betrayal that Gibbs understood more than anything else. They had, after all, found him. They had looked for him for endless months, sacrificed their sleep and their serenity, and all for him. They were like war veterans marching back home with their wounds and their shell shock, only to find that their homes had been burned, their families slaughtered, and their livelihoods destroyed. They had earned these dark circles and paled faces so that Tony could be brought home safe and sound. And Dinozzo, damn him, had actually had the nerve to not be okay. How unbelievable. How selfish. He could see their fury, how, beneath everything, they wanted to shove Tony against the wall and scream at him for being so rude.

And all Gibbs could say to comfort them was: "If you talk to him, touch him." Fantastic. All right then.

"What else?" Abby asked. She was leaning against McGee. "There's more, isn't there?"

"He's lost a little weight."

He laughed. He couldn't help it. The sound just exploded from him and he bent forward, pushing his hands against his knees while it roared out of him, and he wasn't sure if he was going to keep on laughing or start to throw up, but all his years of military training took hold, and his stomach stopped its tap-dance. They were looking at him like he was crazy. Well. Might be so. He put one hand against the side of his mouth as if to keep another laugh from cracking through his skin, and explained how much weight had been lost, exactly. He detailed in technical terms and unintelligent gestures how the Tony they had known had become the Walking Skeleton, someone you'd pay to see in a freak show corner of an illegal carnival.

"God," McGee said finally, not an exclamation or a curse, not a prayer, just a flat statement that hung between them. Gibbs didn't understand it, couldn't personally think of a time he had believed less in God.

"Oh yeah," he said, "_God_, McGee. You want to see him?"

He didn't like the cruelty in his voice but there it was. He couldn't hear it, but saw it in the way they looked scalded in response. In his head, he went further:

_You want to see him, the guy that gave you no end of grief? He's damn lucky that his bones don't go clean through his skin when he moves. Call Kate in here, no reason for her to miss the party, let's let her get a good, long look at him. He used to be such a hotshot, and didn't she hate that? Hate how he thought he was the best thing in the room, the best thing in the country, the best thing in the world? How he was such a pretty boy, and how he knew it? Oh, the cat-fights the two of them used to have, remember, when they couched all those arguments and indications of camaraderie into bitching? He's not so pretty now. Don't think he'll be anywhere close to it anytime soon, either, see - he's collapsed. Take notes, in case you need this for an investigation, in case Ducky can use it later in some anecdote that takes three hours to deliver. Know that the human body collapses in on itself, as if its trying to eat all that useless flesh that can barely keep itself alive. Know that the stomach shrinks and withers, caving in, and all those facial muscles that used to know the electrical codes for smiling and frowning and kissing draw downwards so that your former pretty boy looks like a concentration camp refugee who's just had a stroke. Of course, we don't think like that these days, no, we're too civilized, but what I'm trying to make you see is that the guy who used to turn heads because he had that charm and that smile is going to turn heads because he looks like a plastic surgeon's impending lawsuit, some facelift screwed up to hell and gone. So if you really want to see him, take some pictures. We'll get them on a before and after show along with his old ID, publish them in a diet magazine. Dear Conscientious Readers: All you have to do in order to shed those unwanted sixty-odd pounds is to get someone to lock you up in a little room and not let you out, no matter how much you start to scream._

_All aboard: the last train to your sanity is leaving in this many seconds: 3, 2, 1 . . . gone._

He bit down on his tongue. "They're going to tell me when he wakes up. We can see him then."

"Not now?"

"Abby, sitting beside someone who doesn't know you're there only looks good in the movies." He kept his voice gentle this time. "We'll come in once Dinozzo's headed for the world of the living again."


	3. Tony II

The Window: **Tony (II)**

"Now, it's just a routine series of questions, so I don't want you to be nervous."

"Yeah," he said, and pulled at a loose string on the inside of his coat pocket, "except for the part where I know this routine series of questions is the deciding factor in whether or not I get to keep my job. No reason to be nervous about _that _or anything, God forbid."

A chuckle. "Okay, I can see that you'd be concerned. Shall we start?"

"I'm game if you are, doc."

"Fine. You recertified on your weapons test, passed your physical fitness tests - barely, you could still stand to add on a little more weight, but you passed and that's the bottom line. To be honest, Agent Dinozzo, your superiors are concerned with your decision to not attend the recommended therapy, but they aren't throwing up any roadblocks for you: all of this is strictly routine. Everyone's amazed at how quickly you've put yourself back together: physically, mentally, and emotionally."

"Well, Abby started giving me gold stars for every five pounds I put back on, and that's a hell of a lot of motivation. You know, they're so shiny."

He gave another vicious tug at the string in his pocket, and it ripped free between his fingers.

"And Gibbs stole my address book until I passed physical therapy," he continued. "Ducky made sure that I remembered everything and - taught me a lot of things I never knew in the first place and I'm not sure that I really _needed _to know . . . and McGee . . . and Kate . . . well, I had a lot of help."

He smiled his best smile, all charm.

The doctor didn't seemed charmed, though, he just picked up his clipboard and removed the pen from the sleek metal clamp. Tony shrugged it off - at least the doctor wasn't one of the cold, completely clinical ones that looked him over as if all they were seeing was the shadow of old bones and old wounds underneath his newer skin. This one was a little more human - and, unfortunately, a little more intelligent, but Tony had always found that there were three kinds of people in the world: those he could charm, those he could fool, and NCIS agents.

The doctor wasn't the first, wasn't the last, and therefore had to be the second.

"How much do you remember about your actual abduction?"

"Very little," he admitted unselfconsciously. "I remember driving home from work that night, and then I remember waking up in Hale's room."

"I've read the evaluations of the room. Tell me your impression of it."

"It was small." He didn't have to close his eyes in order to recall the complete image to his mind, it was always layered over his present, like a half-realized fever dream, or a photograph developing over his real life. It had taunted him through his physical therapy, hung over every conversation, always a constant reminder that he could be returned there if it he wasn't as good as they wanted and as good as he'd promised. "The walls were concrete, the door was steel. I had a twin bed - thin mattress, single sheet, bolted to the floor. Half-bath and a pantry."

"What was your reaction? At first?"

"Nonchalance. I knew someone would come."

"And later?"

"Depends on how much later." He held up a hand. "I'm not trying to avoid the question, I just need you to be specific. I changed a lot while I was in there."

"How did you feel when you found out that the search had been called off?"

"Angry."

There, he'd done it - he'd reduced a screaming fit and hysterical ravings to a single word. It wasn't true, but it was a perfect lie because he managed to sound a little ashamed and a little self-conscious, as if anger was the only thing he had inside him that was shameful. It was the best lie - a perfect sound in the air, the perfect reaction from the doctor, a beautiful sound of a hammer striking a bell.

"Later?"

"I started to hallucinate. That was when I started to run out of food."

Gibbs had told him, later, that Bryant Hale had only really stocked the room with enough food for five months, and had been amazed when he'd still heard Tony's activity through the walls. Gibbs had put one hand on the back of Tony's neck and squeezed it in a brief backwards gesture of sentiment - a Gibbs sign of affection, the reverse slap of the head, had said, "You did good, Dinozzo. You stayed alive."

Pretty high praise.

"Do you still see things that aren't there?"

"For the first two weeks after NCIS took me out, I had some trouble telling the difference between real and my own imagination, but not anymore."

"Did you ever relapse?"

-()

"_Before you do, don't."_

_Gibbs stopped three inches from the bed, looking wary. Old days, pre-confinement days, Gibbs would have gotten irritated or confused - on a good day, amused - but now, in these bright, shiny, post-confinement days, Gibbs was always cautious, always wary, and always so considerate that it hurt. It made everything fake, a joke he didn't find funny. Gibbs would come around and ask how he was doing, whether he'd been eating like he was supposed to, whether he was having trouble with nightmares, and then everyone would be surprised when he wasn't sure that Gibbs was real._

"_Before I do what?"_

_Tony folded his arms across his chest. "Don't touch me."_

_Gibbs frowned. "Something wrong, Dinozzo?"_

"_I'm sick of everyone touching me. I'm sick of everyone making reassuring gestures. I'm over the acid trip hallucinations, I know where I am, and I don't need pats on the back to keep my head on straight."_

"_All right," Gibbs said agreeably. "No touching."_

"_Sit down. I'm too tired to stand up and I hate it when people loom over me."_

_Gibbs sat. Gibbs listening? Gibbs following _his _instructions? There was a distinctive advantage to having been crazy and still being doubtfully sane - a definite advantage to being locked in a cage for half-a-year. You got anything you wanted. Too bad hell came along first, or he would have really enjoyed this. Now it just pissed him off._

"_Before you can ask, my physical therapy session was shitty, I haven't gained any weight, and I still won't agree to that plastic surgery. And before I can ask you anything, let me play out that side of the conversation, too. How was your day, boss? Same-old, same-old, Dinozzo. Catch any bad guys? Nothing special. Kate miss me? Like the plague. Anyone coming tomorrow? Blah-blah Kate, blah-blah Abby, blah-blah McGee, blah-blah Ducky. Blah-blah your parents, Dinozzo, anything you want to talk about?" He cut off his mimicry savagely and dug his fingers into his thighs, kneading the sore muscles. Physical therapy was a bitch and a half. "Let's start a new conversation, Gibbs."_

"_All right, Dinozzo."_

"_Because I don't want to talk about therapy or food or surgery, and I don't care about your day."_

"_And you don't want to talk about your parents."_

"_Given." If Gibbs started another mini-tirade about what kind of parents wouldn't come to see their son when he was stuck in the hospital after going through what Tony had gone through, Tony wasn't just going to cover his ears with pillows and hum, he was going to start throwing bed controls and water glasses across the room. "I just - I don't want to talk about that. I'm sick of talking about it, boss, we've worn it into the ground and then some. Can we just pretend for five minutes that nothing happened? Just five minutes, Gibbs, please - five normal minutes where I'm not in the hospital and you're not - pod Gibbs."_

_For a second, Gibbs looked indecisive, and then he said, "We have a dead lieutenant. Someone found him in a meat locker. Bludgeoned to death. Guess the instrument."_

"_Leg of lamb."_

"_Close. Pot roast." Gibbs laughed. "I had to get Kate to talk to the press about it - no one else could keep a straight face all the way through cause of death."_

"_Getting killed with pot roast."_

"_Smack over the head."_

"_If I ever suffer death by pot roast, I want you to be kind and have Ducky say I went out manfully in a hail of gunfire. Say it took six bullets to bring me down."_

"_You kidding, Dinozzo? You get knocked over the head with a pot roast and I'm putting it on my Christmas cards."_

"_You don't send Christmas cards."_

"_I'd start, if I had news like that."_

_They filled up their five minutes with meaningless debate, the respective merits of death by pot roast versus death by leg of lamb. No wheedling for him to keep on shoveling food he didn't want down his throat, no comments about how much better he was looking, no prodding questions about his parents, and most of all and best of all - no asking him if he intended to reconsider that plastic surgery option, reminded again that the cost would be covered._

_They wanted to erase his scars._

_They wanted to take his days away._

_Tony had let them patch up the badly healed gashes on his face, but he hadn't let Gibbs or anyone else talk him into fixing the tally marks and numbers on his arms. He just wore the long-sleeved shirts he had McGee buy for him, and didn't look anyone in the eye when he once again refused to sign the papers._

"_Thanks," he said finally. "For treating me like I'm real, not like I'm crazy -"_

_Gibbs walked into the room, pulled up the chair, and laid his hand across Tony's arm. Tony went absolutely still, trying to see the exact moment when the Gibbs he'd imagined turned into the Gibbs that was indisputably real, and then he snatched his hand away from underneath that reality, face burning with shame. Spontaneous recovery. The doctors had said it would happen. Too many glitches still stuck in his system to expect his coping method to vanish completely, right away. It sounded so logical when they explained it. Nobody told him that spontaneous recovery meant only his hallucinations would pretend that he was sane and always had been._

"_Don't touch me," he said harshly._

_Gibbs was nonplussed. "Why not?"  
_

"_Because I know real from fake now," he said, "and I don't need this constant reassurance."_

_Gibbs nodded. "How was your physical therapy today?"_

"_Good," he lied tonelessly. "It really went well."_

_He didn't try to broach the idea of a five-minute state of grace with Gibbs this time. There wouldn't be a point. They both knew he wasn't sane._

"I had what the doctors called periods of spontaneous recovery. Like post-traumatic stress disorder - I'd revert back to using my own mind to escape, but it wouldn't happen often, just after particularly rough physical sessions or bad nightmares. But the nightmares went away -" he wasn't sure that lie was quite as convincing, "and even the physical stuff stopped bothering me."

"You used it to deal with stress?"

"You could say that."

"But you don't think that, given the nature of your job, the stress would cause you to recall this practice?"

"I thought about that," Tony said, and he had. "They started bringing me files a few weeks ago, using me as a consult, gave me time limits. Pretty stressful situations, but I didn't have any problems handling it. I realize that it's not the same, and I can't know how I'm going to react when something really bad happens, but that's the same problem everyone has. Nobody knows."

"That's very true."

"I've had a lot of time to think about my options."

"I have to admit, Agent Dinozzo, I'd feel better if you'd agree to see someone professionally about your experience. I respect your privacy, of course, and I know that you're close to your coworkers and that they've been of great help to you, but there's some assistance that therapy would provide that your current support system lacks."

"Such as?"

"Do you feel uncomfortable with your coworkers now?"

Tony was blunt. "Special Agent Gibbs pulled me out of hell, doc. I couldn't walk. I was naked. He wrapped me in a sheet and practically carried me outside while I was raving in his ear about things that didn't exist. Agent Todd was in the room when I threw up all over myself trying to eat. If I were uncomfortable with my coworkers, I wouldn't be alive right now. I know things are supposed to look different after the dust clears, but things are still the same."

Except for how he couldn't look them in the eyes. Any of them.

"How do you feel about Bryant Hale?"

He'd been eating applesauce when Kate had told him. He remembered that not because the memory of food was indelibly tied to the memory of Hale, but because she had told him in the third week, and he'd still been on soft, mushy, nutritious foods. He still couldn't get the taste of all those sugary apples out of his mouth, no matter how many times he scrubbed his teeth. His toothbrush was starting to look bloody and ragged. Not important. What mattered was how he remembered pausing with the spoon halfway to his mouth, and when his hand had started shaking, a glob of lukewarm applesauce had toppled onto his hospital gown and seeped through to his skin.

-()

"_I don't even know who that is," he said finally, wiping at the damp patch on the gown, his face burning. "I - I don't even know who that is." It seemed very significant to let her know that, because it was so inexplicable to him - how someone he'd never met would lock him away in a box._

"_Gibbs put him away for kidnapping a Marine two years before you joined NCIS."_

"_So this was some personal thing." He took the napkin she extended and blotted the fabric. "Right?"_

_He didn't know what she wanted his reaction to be, and he could have tried to manufacture one, but he was too tired. Confusion had blurred the edges of all his responses, and left him with trying to scrub a spreading applesauce stain out of a cheap cloth gown. His mind drifted from the words, making the connections with the distant sound of a key turning in a lock. Gibbs. Personal. Marine. NCIS. He wondered if she wanted him to be angry about this._

"_When Gibbs found out, he didn't handle it well."_

"_No," Tony said distantly, "I don't think he would."_

_He rubbed harder, but could still feel the dampness. Dammit. No matter how hard he scrubbed, it never went away. And if he didn't get it out, it would just become another blemish they'd want to erase it the way they wanted to erase the numbers from his arms - take away all of his days and all of his ingrained memories. Didn't they understand how easily you forgot things when you couldn't see them? If you didn't throw it out right away, you had to keep it forever, those were the rules._

"_We just wanted you to know that he's in custody," Kate said, "and you won't have to testify."_

"_That's nice," he said, and turned his attention back to the spot. "I'm really very happy for you."_

"_Tony -"_

"_Don't take it so personally, Kate." He attacked it again. His skin ached, rubbed raw. "It's nothing personal, just like I shouldn't take it personally that I'm the one who got locked in a damned box until I lost my mind. I'm not taking it personally at all. No reason why you should feel a little guilty because it took you six months to get me out. No reason to feel guilty about fucking up the whole Eurydice parable we had going on here. I don't blame you, because I'm not taking it personally."_

"_Eurydice," she said softly._

_He put a hand over his eyes. "When you want to impersonate people who are smarter than you, Kate, you have to dig up every iota of what you've forgotten. Did I ever tell you how amazing it is, all the things you can remember when you can barely think of your own name? I used to have these dreams where Gibbs would show up and tell me that I'd been recalled to life."_

"_Charles Dickens."_

"A Tale of Two Cities_," he said, nodding. "Can you hand me another napkin?"_

_She gave it to him, wordlessly, and he smiled as he took it._

"_I just can't seem to get this stain out," he said, scrubbing harder. "I had to wash my clothes in there, did I tell you that? I mean, you probably could have guessed. I was naked when Gibbs brought me out, but I wore the clothes as long as I could, but there's not much you can do with bar soap and a tiny sink, especially when you wear the same thing day in and day out. You know, when I finally realized that I'd worn them to pieces, I pounded on the door for about an hour and demanded that he bring me more clothes. That's funny, isn't it?"_

_Kate shook her head. "No, it's not."_

"_I think it's funny," he said, almost offended. "Six months in there, and I was mostly at that door demanding luxury items. Of course, the one time, I told him he had to take me to the hospital."_

"_Why did you need to go to the hospital?"_

_He knew that she was looking at the scars on his arms, and he blocked them, turning them inward. "Smashed my face against a mirror," he said. "Didn't you see the scars?" Tony didn't wait for her to answer, just switched back to Hale as if they'd never been talking about anything else. "So he put me in the room because he wanted to annoy Gibbs?"_

"_He was crazy, Tony."_

"_It's going around," he said, putting the napkin down. There. The stain was gone. "And it's not so bad, not once you get used to it." He snapped his fingers, feeling his smile widen as the perfect thought occurred to him. "You know, they sent Eurydice back to hell."_

-()

"Bryant Hale," he said, mulling over the words. "I never even really met him, did they tell you that? He was there when Agent Gibbs brought me out of confinement, but I didn't really understand what was happening, and they didn't really tell me who he was. Agent Todd told me, later, who he was - a pattern-criminal with a grudge against NCIS. This might sound crazy, but I didn't take it personally. Hearing that it was more of an act against an organization almost made me feel better - because I'd been trying to understand why someone I didn't even know had done that to me. Systematic terrorism almost makes more sense. But it doesn't fix anything."

_You know that you are recalled to life?_

"What do you mean?"

"I still hate him," he said.

It was very blunt for something that was a complete lie. He had never hated Bryant Hale. And after they had let him out of the box, he had even stopped hating Hale's experiment. It was as if a thick veil of indifference had settled over him and wrapped tight.

_You know that you are recalled to life?_

_They tell me so._

"That's a perfectly reasonable reaction," the doctor said, and wrote it down.

_I hope you care to live._

_I can't say._

-()

Gibbs was waiting outside the door when Tony swung it open. Tony thought he'd seen walls with more of an expression. Gibbs's frown was set in concrete. Tony didn't bother having the inevitable conversation right there in front of the office, he just swung into step and let Gibbs try and catch up with him, hoping that he got far enough that Gibbs had to jog to meet him again once he broke out of that shock. But Gibbs, ever composed, was only a beat behind, in a second, was ahead.

"That was a lot of bullshit in there, Dinozzo," Gibbs said finally.

Tony listened to the sounds of their footsteps echoing in the hallway. There hadn't been any echoes in Hale's little room - all the walls had been too tight for that. Now he listened to the secondhand sound and caught Gibbs's remark a few seconds later, trailing behind the clicking heels.

"Now, boss," he said, "that's not very encouraging. Not in my tentative mental state."

"What the hell happened, Tony?"

"I think I just passed with flying colors. Weren't you listening to how happy he sounded? I'm just as sane as sane can be. I could give the Dalai Llama a run for his money. What do you think? I did pretty good in there, yeah, Gibbs? No running off at the mouth. Short and sweet and to-the-point, damn, I _killed _in there. Knocked him dead, didn't I? I know you were listening."

"You lied. You don't hate Bryant Hale."

"I can see how you'd know that," Tony said, wanting to be angry but not quite making it, "from all those heart-to-heart chats we've had about my feelings."

Gibbs turned his head to each side and then pushed him into the nearby bathroom, not giving him a chance to adjust to the new, closer walls before pinning him against one. He heard, more than felt, the distant crack of his head against the tile wall. The whole place reeked of ammonia and piss, and Tony squirmed, not wanting to touch any part of it, but Gibbs didn't move.

"You don't feel anything anymore, Dinozzo. You think I can't tell?"

"Get off me."

"You don't think I know what hate looks like? You don't think I'd be able to tell if you felt that way? I wouldn't have to look very far, I know damn well what _I _look like every time someone even mentions that bastard, I'd be able to see it in your eyes. They'd go dark, Dinozzo," his elbow ground into Tony's shoulder, "are you _listening_ to me? And your mouth would tense up and you wouldn't even be able to talk because it would be like spitting nails. Are you getting any of this at all? Dry mouth. Your skin would crawl and you'd look down and see your hands in fists. That's hate. You don't have it. You're moving on autopilot and it's scaring the _shit _out of me."

"Get off me!" He wormed out from underneath Gibbs's weight and went into the open, arms spiraling, feeling as if he were going to topple onto the floor. He felt his face burning. "Don't _touch_ me!" He swung wide, almost to counteract his tumble, and struck Gibbs in the jaw. It was a silly punch, ridiculous, weak. A roundhouse that barely connected, but the second he heard the dull thud, he felt something snap in his center. Breaking point.

Which was funny, because he thought he'd already broken.

"You lied all the way through that," Gibbs said, one hand over the side of his mouth. "You were good, but you were lying."

"I'm back on your team," he whispered. "They proved me sane six ways from Sunday."

"Not if I go in there and tell him -"

"Tell him what, Gibbs? I battered myself in there. Told him how the hallucinations hung around for a long time before they took off, told him that I was bitter and angry and scared. What can you possibly say, go in and start telling him that I must be really screwed up, because I don't hate enough? You know what, go ahead and try it. You'll be the one they lock in a padded cell."

Gibbs grinned hard at him, his smile all teeth. "Now that's what hate looks like, Dinozzo. Right there."

"I could really learn to hate you full-time," he said tiredly, straightening his jacket. "That's something to get used to, you know. I never hated you before."

Gibbs's hands were warm on his shoulders, and Tony turned his head to one side, not wanting to look.

"Talk to me, Dinozzo. You're more alive now than you've been in a month."

"I went crazy," he said to the wall. "I really lost it in there. But you know what sucks the most, Gibbs? I never lost all of it. I kept just enough to keep making it all end. I escaped from that place a hundred times, and then that little bit of logic kicked in and told me that I was still there. You know what does that now? Alarm clocks. I'll hear one go off and I'll feel like a bubble's rising in my head, getting ready to pull me out of another rescue dream. It always messed with me. You too."

"I wasn't there, Tony."

"Sure you were," Tony said. "Not really, but you were, because I never forgot you. Saw you more often than anyone. I mean, I had Kate to ask all the tough questions, and McGee to be my conscience, but I had you to - I don't even know what you were doing, but you were there more than anyone else. You talked to me. In the craziest way, you kept me sane."

"I can't blame you for hating me for that," Gibbs said, and let him go.

Tony leaned against the wall. The mixed scent of lemons and urine rose up and trickled into his nose. He thought that he might cry.

"You don't get it," he said. "You don't understand."

"I understand," Gibbs said, helping him away from the wall, using his hands like a rope-ladder descending from a vertical plane. And then, somehow, Tony fell against him, instead, and Gibbs didn't push him away, just pulled him closer. Tony wondered if Gibbs could feel the heat of his face burning through his shirt, and it wasn't comforting at all, just embarrassing, crying and being hugged by his boss in this sour, citrus-smelling bathroom. "I'm sorry, Dinozzo. We looked for you. I promise we looked for you."

That wasn't what Tony had meant, not at all.

"I know," he said into Gibbs's shoulder. "I know you did."

And he did know that, he hadn't needed verification from Kate to prove that once he was gone, Gibbs had lost a lot of his patience in the search. All he'd really needed to know that Gibbs had driven himself over the deep end looking for him was to remember how Gibbs had looked when he'd crashed into Bryant Hale's room, when Tony had still been a little absently confused, because it was rare that his hallucinations showed such independent emotions, and even rarer when they looked like they couldn't decide whether to scream or throw up or start praying. So yes, despite the announcement on the news, Tony was well-aware that Gibbs had been looking for him.

This stifling, uncomfortable hug was probably more for Gibbs than it was for him, so he tightened his arms around Gibbs and pressed his face into his shirt, waiting for the heat of tears to seep through him again. Nothing happened. Maybe it was just - maybe he was just worn out. It had been a long day.

Gibbs was going to let him go into the field again, he knew that - because the one thing Gibbs couldn't handle was guilt and the one thing Tony could handle was the orchestration of emotions. A virtuoso. He just needed to get back in practice before his skills started getting rusty - the psychiatrist had been good practice, but this was the real deal - Gibbs was what was really standing between him and his return. Gibbs, and Gibbs's guilt. But this would be easy. He'd had to lie in order to manipulate the doctor, he only had to tell the truth in order to play Gibbs's strings.

He raised his head and his mouth was near Gibbs's ear. "It was easy there," he said softly, and felt Gibbs go absolutely still. "I couldn't tell you that before. I didn't think you'd understand.

"But there," he continued, aware of how he could no longer feel Gibbs's breath on his neck, as if Gibbs had stopped breathing entirely, "after I stopped trying, I had everything I wanted. I had everything."

"Jesus, Dinozzo," Gibbs said faintly, and Tony, pulling back, smiled at him.

"That's why you shouldn't feel bad, boss," he said. "That's why it shouldn't bother you, how long it took to find me, or that Bryant Hale was trying to hurt you the whole time. It shouldn't bother you, because sometimes, Gibbs, when I didn't wonder about it - sometimes it was really good."


	4. Gibbs II and Tony III

The Window: **Gibbs (II)**

The resignation letter Tony left on his desk was polite, well-phrased, and professional. Gibbs read it twice. He wondered about the other jobs that Tony had abandoned over the years, wondered if all of the letters he'd left had been as devoid of nuance as this one, or if it had taken practice to whittle away any sign of something deeper. He'd wanted more from Tony. He'd expected pain or regret or some kind of apology. Tony had given him typeface. As much as he wanted to read something more into the stark lines of print, as much as he wanted to hear Tony's bemused voice saying, _Sorry, boss - - greener pastures and fewer memories. You know how it is_, he couldn't. Tony had given nothing away.

He folded the letter and put it in his desk. Across the room, Tony looked at him, unblinking, like some kind of squatted idol carved from stone. Getting a reaction from Dinozzo used to be simple, but now Gibbs could only batter against that rock and hope that at least erosion was working in his favor. The resignation was just the formal announcement of what had been happening for months. Tony had been cutting him out since the incident in the bathroom and he'd even done a damned good job of making sure the two of them were rarely in the same room together, and never alone.

He'd been given foreshadowing enough, if he was the type of man who needed that. He felt compelled to write this down somewhere: _this is what Tony Dinozzo does when he's getting ready to bolt_. He could mail it to wherever Tony went next.

The pressure in his chest tightened and then the anger hit him, because, what the hell, Dinozzo? Tony had last longer here than anywhere else, didn't they all deserve something a little more than a fill-in-the-blank letter of resignation?

Tony was still looking at him, perfectly expressionless, daring him to . . . what? Make a scene? Crumble the letter in his fist? Yell? Gibbs thought about his second wife, who had told him she wanted a divorce in the middle of a crowded restaurant, thinking that he wouldn't have the nerve to fight about it there and then giving him a huge, shit-eating grin when he had, liking it. Drama queen. He hadn't thought that Tony would be the same way, but the letter and the careful nonchalance reeked of wife number two.

All they were missing was the cheap house wine.

Gibbs had never tried to save anyone before; he wasn't that kind of man. Rescue was easy, it was simple reconnaissance, and he had learned that years before Dinozzo. _Rescuing_ Tony had been child's play compared to actually _saving_ him. Still, he'd tried. He had done for Tony what he had never been willing to do for anyone: he had tried to make himself safe. He had waited in the hospital, coaxed Tony through physical therapy, and stared at those goddamned scars on his arms every time the scrubs top had shifted on Tony's skeleton frame.

He had walked Tony out of Hale's room wrapped in a filthy, blood-stained sheet; he had let Tony hit him; he had put his hands on Tony's shoulders while Tony cried into his shirt and whispered nightmares in his ear; and Tony left him a letter of resignation that was trite and meaningless and looked at him across the room like a stranger.

And maybe he was a stranger, in his long-sleeved shirt to hide the scars, with his sharp cheekbones, and his impassive eyes.

Gibbs touched the letter and felt the weight of Tony's indifference through the paper, striking against his fingertips, knocking his hand aside.

A year ago, the letter would have been a gauche joke; a ploy for attention. It would have been sly, with inserted jokes, and Gibbs would have known immediately that it was not serious, that it never could be. It was funny: in all of Tony's recounted stories of job-switches, he had always imagined someone too restless to settle down, someone who amiably parted ways after growing uncomfortable. He had never envisioned this kind of chilly _blankness_, this mechanical letter that held nothing of what he still thought to be the _real_ Tony.

It scared the hell out of him to think that this new Tony might actually be the real one, the one that had always existed underneath the layers of humanity that he had wrapped around him for the sake of warmth. It was possible that he had underestimated (or was it overestimated, in this case?) Tony. Maybe Tony had always been steel and ice hidden behind his own skin, and Gibbs hadn't noticed.

But that couldn't be true, not when he had felt Tony's hands on his back, steadying him after he'd taken the bullet from Ari. It hadn't been true then. It hadn't been true for the Tony who had once helped him sand the boat with smooth, unbroken gestures.

He found himself longing for the boat, for the solidity of tools in his hands. Tony had understood him, at least for those few hours of sanding, what it meant to peel away the unnecessary wood to reach the idea of the elegant-lined boat he could always see underneath. One day, he was going to grind it down to nothing. Perfection kept slipping further into the grain and he chased it, following it down. He might eventually coax it into fitting into a bottle, but it would never leave the basement, never sail.

The layer of sawdust on his floor had thickened during Tony's disappearance.

It was maybe the thought of how the dust would kick up around his feet when he walked from bow to stern, frantically clawing at the wood with tools and sandpaper, that made his throat catch. The air would be full of sawdust, choking him, and Tony would be on some flight gaining distance through the sky, putting miles and time-zones between himself and Hale, between himself and his team. And the sound, in his own ears, of the tools slipping over the curve of the belly, whispers against silky-smooth wood, everything getting smaller and smaller, whittled away.

"Dinozzo," he said, "why don't we go get some coffee?"

Tony gave him some approximation of a smile and lifted his cup, circling it in the air so that Gibbs could hear the liquid inside sloshing around, and had Tony thought of _everything_?

"Thanks but no thanks, boss," he said. "I'm good."

He shouldn't have been surprised. He had taught Tony everything he knew about being a bastard, after all, but he hadn't expected that Tony would have been such a good student.

It would have been easy to pass the resignation letter off to Abby. Even to Kate or McGee. They were the ones that legitimately needed him, they were the ones who were closer to being friends. They were the ones who could bat their eyelashes and pout and convince Tony to stay. But it would be taking the coward's way out. If Tony stayed because of them, he would find a way to get himself killed within the month, just to crawl out of his own skin. There was a reason Tony hadn't told them. He had given the letter to Gibbs instead of going straight to the Director. He was giving Gibbs a chance to convince him, but only Gibbs.

Tony had drawn the line in the sand between the two of them, and what they were left with was a war of two people that didn't even want to fight.

He was the soldier; Dinozzo was only playing dress-up. All of the shit cases in the world didn't amount to the bodies of the fallen in his arms, bleeding out over his uniform. He knew warfare. Dinozzo was amateur hour.

Gibbs would win, he knew that, but he had seen enough Pyrrhic victories to know that winning wasn't always enough.

But he remembered the weight of Tony underneath his hands when Tony had collapsed against him. His mouth had still been aching from Tony's silly, stupid roundhouse. They had _looked_ for him, he had tried to tell Dinozzo that, but Tony only answered that it had been okay, really. That he almost hadn't minded. Goddamn Dinozzo, still with tears on his face, telling Gibbs that he had had everything he had ever wanted.

Winning would have to be enough, because he wasn't sure he could have anything more.

He wasn't sure that Tony had anything more to give.

-()

He stayed in the office late, drinking coffee that had grown cold and sluggish. It was the office pot, not strong enough to keep him awake, but he drank from habit. If there had ever been a night when Gibbs could not have fallen asleep, it would have been this one. He was too conscious the whole day of Tony's resignation letter in his desk drawer, seemingly curled and ready to hiss each time he passed his hand over the handle. It was easier to hate that coolly rational letter than it was to hate Tony - - Tony who used to beg for approval like a puppy sitting up on its haunches and who was now so damnably untouchable.

But not unreachable. At least, that was how he had gathered all his hopes and pinned them on his ability to bridge the gap that Hale had so mercilessly created between them.

He watched the hand of his watch move closer to eleven. The sky outside was a shadow, broken not by stars but by the occasional headlight piercing through. Dinozzo would be home by now. He might be sleeping, curled in his bed and breathing out nightmares into his pillow, but somehow Gibbs didn't think so. He thought it was more likely that Tony was before his own window, looking out at the inky darkness that closed him in, waiting.

Tony would know that it was show time.

By the time he could rouse himself from the silence and the reassurance of routine, by the time he could made the drive to Tony's, it was past midnight and heading closer to one. He sat outside the complex and listened to the soft hiss of the air conditioning. It should have been winter, so that his breath would freeze in the air, so that snow would soften the angles of the modern building and turn it into something mysterious, so that ice would frost the sidewalk and make each step dangerous. It should have been raining. But it was only night, warm and humid, and when he finally yanked the keys from the ignition and went out, his first breath of dewy air was like drowning.

Tony's door was unlocked. He had thought it would be.

"I had a feeling," Tony said, his voice from nowhere like a ventriloquist's trick. It took a moment for Gibbs's eyes to adjust to the darkness and to know that Tony was sitting on the sofa, his arms folded behind his head and his legs sprawled out over the floor. How long had he sat there in the dark? "You can't leave well enough alone, boss. Never could. Nothing's ever enough for you."

"Nothing, Dinozzo, is all you were going to give me."

"Ouch."

Gibbs held up his hands. "Just the two of us here."

He could see the flash of teeth from Tony's smile. "Yeah, I know. No witnesses."

"Scared, Tony?"

The grin stayed in the darkness, nothing but bared teeth. "Oh, boss," he said softly. "You're the one that's scared."

Gibbs found that it was true. "I could have told them," he said. "You would have stayed for them, wouldn't you?" He saw Tony's nod and pressed on. "But I didn't tell them, because if I made you stay, if I did that, you'd be gone in a month, one way or another, wouldn't you? There are just too many damned opportunities for you to get in the line of fire, and I can't spend every minute in the field looking over my shoulder to see if you're ready to die."

"What makes you think what you're doing is any different?" Tony moved suddenly, standing. "What makes you think I wouldn't stay if _you _asked?"

"I won't ask, Dinozzo."

His refusal stood between the two of them, something with its own life.

"I know," Tony said finally, quietly. "I know you won't. That's why I let you in." For that single second, there was an opening, and he could _see_ the real Tony underneath the shadow, the one that could be found if the rest were only hewn away, but then it was gone. Tony turned away from him and headed for the kitchen. "Something to drink, boss? I've got some bottled water. It's not cold, but it's good enough."

He felt the cold on the back of his neck, the touch of a ghost.

"No," he said, though his mouth was dry. "I'm fine, Tony."

Tony padded back in, still smiling, as if he could no longer determine how to stop. He cradled the bottle in his arm as if the plastic might break apart like crystal at even the gentlest touch.

"I made towers," he said. "I never told you that. I knocked them all down by the time you found me, but I used to make towers out of these bottles. Stack them up and watch them fall. It's a little like building a house of cards, only I really just wanted them to hit the ground. I was always looking for something else: I wanted Dr. Pepper, coffee, beer."

He held up the bottle in his hand. The light through the curtains caught it, made the dust on the plastic glitter.

"But I don't have any of that here. Just this. It's easier this way.

"Are you sure you don't want anything to drink?"

"I'm sure," Gibbs said quietly.

Tony sat down again and only held the water, not even bothering to crack the bottle open. But of course he wouldn't have - - he would have never had all of it at once. He would have had only enough to moisten his mouth, trying to stretch out how long it would last. The full bottles must have been scattered grails, protected and sought-after.

"It's not as bad as you think it is, Gibbs," he said. "I put my foot through the TV the first time I got back, but I didn't move the furniture. There's no room with just a bed. I have fresh fruit in the kitchen and everything. But sometimes this is better."

"Is it?"

"Sometimes," Tony said. "You don't understand. I used to wish that you hadn't found me."

"And now?" He was afraid of the answer.

Tony wouldn't look at him, but there was another chink in his armor, this one wider and deeper, all the way down to his heart.

"Sometimes," he only said.

"Why do you need to leave?"

"I want to forget."

"You want to forget the wrong things, Dinozzo. You drink the same water and you have the same scars, what do you want to leave behind?" He stood and remembered how it had been between them in the bathroom, with Tony's face only an inch away from his and screaming. Tony hating him. At least he had _gotten_ something then, touched on some exposed wire and achieved a reaction. "You carry it around with you all the time. You never try to be anything but Hale's pet. Maybe he won after all, because it's been months and all you've really done is gain back some weight. You aren't better sometimes. You aren't better at all. Do you still think I'm there when I'm not? Do you still keep looking for that damn _window_? Is that where you are in your head all day, Tony? You would have done better if you _had_ moved your furniture and admitted it. You never got out of that room even after I opened the door. You're still there."

"If I were there, I'd be dead."

"Isn't that what you wanted? You still wish I never found you? What was so great about it, Dinozzo? Were you really that desperate for some alone-time?"

Tony sat perfectly still, as if he would fly apart if he moved.

"I know what you're doing," he whispered. "It's not going to work. You arrogant son of a _bitch_, do you think I'll let you break me just so you can get me back how you want?"

If he had said it calmly, if he had said it coldly, there would never have been any hope.

But now Tony was desperate.

"What is it, Tony? You told me that you had everything you wanted there. What did you have? What did you lose when we saved your life?"

"I was _happy_, goddamn you. I was _happy_. I was dying and I was losing my mind, but at the very end, when it was going to be over, I was _happy_. It was so easy, boss. You don't even know. I gave up. I just sat there and I watched you like I used to watch the TV, I watched everyone, and it was perfect, Gibbs, the way I wanted things to be. I was _out_, I'd never been _in_, and I wasn't hungry or cold or dying or crazy, I was _happy_, don't you _get that_?"

Tony's face was livid now. He could never have been stone, no, not _this_ Tony who was so obviously alive even if he didn't want to be. For the first time since he had been saved, he breathed in and seemed to fracture. He looked at Gibbs in absolute panic, and reached out to touch him. Gibbs let the warm hand settle against his face, sweaty and hot, as if Tony were blind and groping for some line of sight. Confirming truth, confirming reality.

"Like that," Gibbs said. "Like that, Tony," and he settled Tony's hand on his cheek. "It's going to be okay. I know now. I'm sorry. It's going to be okay."

Tony turned his head. "I never got better," he said. "I never did."

"I know." He kept his hand in Tony's hair. "I know you didn't. We'll make it better. You think I'm going to give up on you _now_, after all this? It isn't going to be perfect, Tony, but I understand now and it'll get better."

"I'll get better?"

Tony looked at him nakedly, the stone idol shattered to dust, the enemy reduced to a conquered friend. It was bitter, this victory, so much so that he barely felt the triumph in his own blood. But it was victory, nonetheless. Tony had finally shown him the truth. And if it were smaller than he had expected, if it was buried deeper than he'd known, he saw it now. He knew that he could get there.

"You'll get better," he said, because he could know no other truth. "You'll be fine."

The Window: **Tony (III)**

It was his only t-shirt, the NCIS one that he had worn as soft as butter. It left a few of the faded scars visible on his arms, but they had grown duller as he had grown browner, and now they seemed more artistic than troubling: small, uneven, notched tattoos. Still, he had maintained the longer shirts and the suits until today, uncomfortable with the exposure. It was, after all, his life, his secrets, written out on his skin.

But it wasn't as if Gibbs didn't already know them.

He leaned against the table and watched another strip of wood being slowly torn from the hull. Gibbs was never going to be done with that thing. Maybe he didn't even want to be. Everyone had their something.

"I didn't invite you over to drink all the Jack and watch the farm report, Dinozzo. Grab a sander and get to work."

"Yes, boss," he said, even though the wood was as smooth as silk everywhere he touched it. He liked the boat. "Just trying to see that thing you're always talking about, the Zen one. The boat within the boat. I'm trying to be the wood."

Gibbs glared at him, but two glasses of good bourbon would mellow out anyone's death stare.

Tony circled his side and touched where the boards came together. It was good, this thing he'd had a hand in making, and yes, it was an it and not a she. He was never going to surrender that point. But it was pretty beautiful, all things considered. Pretty okay.

When he lifted his hand to shield his eyes from the gasoline-yellow light overhead, his sleeve fell back and he could see the numbers he had carved into his skin. He jerked his arm back down and tugged at the sleeve, but remembered: just numbers. Just scars. And he was getting better. On days like this one, it wasn't so hard to believe that. He let go of the sleeve and gave in to that expanse of dated flesh.

Those weren't the numbers that were important anymore, anyway. They counted something he was slowly surrendering to the darkness.

"I have a date for Friday," he said, "so I won't be down."

"You think it'll go okay?"

"No," Tony said, laughing. "I'm pretty sure I'll screw it up, actually, but at least mental distress is a good excuse if she turns out to be a total Glenn Close. I've never had a chance to try out the 'it's not you, it's my lingering instability' ploy works."

"Looking on the bright side?"

Tony smiled but didn't answer, not wanting to lie when he was getting better at telling the truth, and ducked between two suspended planks to get at where he could maybe see something more defined and real underneath the surplus grain. He put his hand there and could feel it through the wood, like a heartbeat. It was within reach now. Just a slivery layer to be shed before he could touch it. It would look good, once he peeled it away.

He took the sander and brought it to the side of the boat, moved it easily over the surface. Almost there. He brushed a line of sawdust away and watched it develop.

"I think I'm done now, boss," he said.

He hadn't known that Gibbs was behind him until he felt the hand on his shoulder. "It looks good, Tony."

"Yeah, it does," Tony said, and meant it. "I really got it this time."

He turned his head to smile at Gibbs and then moved further down along the boat, his hand searching for some roughness that could be sanded away, some illusion that could be opened like a window into what was underneath.


End file.
